New Scientist becomes Non Scientist

You might think journalists at a popular science magazine would be able to investigate and reason.

In DenierGate, watch New Scientist closely, as they do the unthinkable and try to defend gross scientific malpractice by saying it’s OK because other people did other things a little bit wrong (that were not related) a long time ago. Move along ladies and gentlemen, there’s nothing to see…

The big problem for this formerly good publication is that they have decided already what the answer is to any question on climate-change (and the answer could be warm or cold but it’s always ALARMING). That leaves them clutching for sand-bags to prop up their position as the king-tide sweeps away any journalistic credibility they might have had.

I’ve added my own helpful notes into the New Scientist article, just so you get the full picture.

NS (New Scientist): “Climategate” has put scientists on trial in the court of public opinion.

NS: If you believe climate skeptics, a huge body of evidence* involving the work of tens of thousands of scientists over more than a century…

JN: I’d hate to exaggerate, but the IPCC can only name 60 scientists who reviewed the evidence on causation in the Fourth Assessment Report, and most of them were either reviewing their own work, had a vested interest, or are themselves caught up in the Climategate scandal …

NS: –should be thrown out on the basis of the alleged misconduct of a handful of researchers, even though nothing in the hacked emails has been shown to undermine any of the scientific conclusions*.

JN: Nothing? So for New Scientist, it’s normal practice to refuse to provide data, refuse FOI’s, and then delete data? Maybe this is the normal practice for a religion, but it sure isn’t normal for science.

And spot the appearance of the mythical “HUGE body of evidence”. Can anyone at New Scientist find that one mystery paper with empirical evidence showing that carbon causes major warming? Just ONE? That’s major warming, not minor. And that’s empirical, i.e., by observation, not by simulation.

This is the paragraph where New Scientist proves it has become Non Scientist:

“If we are going to judge the truth of claims on the behavior of those making them, it seems only fair to look at the behavior of a few of those questioning the scientific consensus. There are many similar examples we did not include. We leave readers to draw their own conclusions about who to trust.”

Alarm bells are ringing from Galileo’s grave. We’re trying to figure out if the world is warming due to man-made carbon right? New Scientist’s method is not to look at the evidence, but to look at the behavior of the sceptics. Did you see the black hole of ad hominem that this once esteemed journal just stepped into? Logic and reason were reduced in a flash to a naked singularity. Follow its reasoning through the black hole, and you don’t emerge on the other side.

Did you see the black hole of ad hominem that this once esteemed journal just stepped into?

Who to trust indeed? Let’s trust people who can reason, and scientists who don’t hide their data. It doesn’t matter how “sceptics behave”; it matters whether the data can be independently analyzed and interpreted; whether the conclusions are robust. But, since the data is g o n e, no one can verify anything. So in a way, it does come down to “trust”: In the new quasi-religious form of science, you have to trust those who hold the global data. Isn’t postmodern “science” an awful lot like the old religions?

Did they make the right “adjustments”? Who the heck knows?

So does New Scientist publish the most significant emails to let readers make up their own minds, or do they hide the damning lines, and feed in some old distractions they found in a festering mess of bias called the New Scientist Archive? Choose B. Go for an eighteen-year old paper by people not mentioned in the hacked emails. Of course. Then have another go at a science documentary that didn’t mention the hacked emails, but got part of a graph wrong. (And don’t mention that Al Gore’s movie made nine significant errors as determined by a British Court.)

New Scientist is attacking the 31,000 volunteer scientists, while it defends the 60 corrupt paid ones.

Then, take another swipe at the unpaid scientists who arranged a petition that attracted thousands of signatures. New Scientist briefly notes the latest version of this petition, but since they really can’t find any flaws with this new version, which has an astounding 31,000 signatures on it, New Scientist spends several paragraphs on the earlier version, which could have been done a bit better, but was obviously mainly right, as shown by the second round… Remember the petition was done by volunteers and done twice. It’s the largest grassroots movement of scientists on any topic anywhere in the world, and New Scientist is attacking the 31,000 volunteer scientists, while it defends the 60 corrupt paid ones.

It’s beyond silly. The mindless irrelevant attacks go on. They attack Nigel Lawson for using a misleadingly short time — eight years — to argue that the world is not warming (which is exactly what the satellite data shows). Eight years is too short for New Scientist to announce a flat trend, but in every other article with a single flood, a single cyclone, or a single heat wave, one week is long enough for New Scientist to imply that global warming might be to blame. So a season of hurricanes is significant, but years of cooling is misleading. Righto. (And Amen!)

They attack Christopher Monckton’s paper, not because they can summarize why it was in error, but because another group disagree, and there are some technicalities of whether it jumped through the right hoops to be called “peer review.” Attack the man and not the message eh? New Scientist stands up for the bureaucratic details of “peer review” (only some peers count), but they won’t stand up for the independent scientists, the whistleblowers who want access to data, just to check those “peer reviewed papers” didn’t turn out to be baseless frauds like the Hockey Stick.

We subscribers buy New Scientist in the hope it will impartially give us both sides of the story in a summary form that is accurate…. And the subscribers are rebelling. The commenters below the article are 90% skeptics, 2% believers, and the rest are presumably so angry their comments were deleted.

I think it might be time to form the New Scientist Action Group – one where subscribers and former subscribers think of ways to rescue this once great magazine from itself.

Is there any excuse? New Scientist tries them all.

* New Scientist claims nothing in the hacked emails (which might have been leaked) is of any concern and they link to this article. Here they at least manage to stick to the topic of ClimateGate – but the reasoning amounts to saying that the scandal is OK for a litany of excuses that don’t add up:

“The world is warming.” So because the world is warming due to some mix of causes, it’s alright if scientists fiddle the data on the exact temperature trend. What’s the difference: 0.1 degrees, 0.3 degrees? There are only trillions of dollars resting on it.

“We know greenhouse gases are the main cause of warming.” Yes, that’s according to a committee that includes the scientists implicated in the scandal. That sounds fine, comrade…

“Scientists need to fix the data.” They do, but somehow the corrections are always toward the catastrophic model predictions. Strange how the radiosondes, satellites, ocean buoys and thermometers are all in a conspiracy to hide the warming… Who would have thought?

“Hiding declines is OK.” They don’t know why their favorite proxy doesn’t find warming after 1960, but they’ll hide that and use a thermometer reading, which is bound to be more accurate, even though over half of them are now near hot airport tarmacs, and most of the rest have air conditioning outlets nearby. The words “cherry picking” come to mind… Why are tree rings good for 1000 years, then bad for 50 — just at the time we have thermometers that have siting problems we can use instead. Coincidence?

“Avoiding Freedom of Information requests is OK, too.” If you want to avoid legal requests for data that you should have provided freely anyway, you could: A/ Supply that information, or B/ Hide it and claim there were other legal reasons why you hid it (but the drawback is that then you face FOI’s for those legal agreements which you don’t have), or C/ hide everything so long that you get flooded with repeated FOI’s — then you can pretend that you were swamped and couldn’t meet them all.

It’s too easy. If you are a “CO2-is-the-cause-of-global-warming” scientist, there is nothing you can do that is outside the bounds of normal science. New Scientist will defend you.

UPDATE!

The scientists caught by ClimateGate may have influence over New Scientist. From Watts Up(thanks Anthony).

In comments, Keith Minto points out the New Scientist is listed in the Climategate e-mails

I read New Scientist on and off for about 40 years. Last year I cancelled my subscription and told them exactly why. It was solely because of their anti-scientific coverage of global warming. New Scientist had lost Nigel Calder as editor and had become like a tabloid newspaper on global warming. It still had some good articles in there, but I wasn’t prepared to pay for the global warming propaganda.

In the “spot the real denier thread”, you asked marrion morrison to provide a reference to a paper that showed empirical evidence of Co2 causing more than 1.5 degrees of warming. I asked this question in another thread but I will repeat i here for you:

Is there any paper with empirical evidence that shows Co2 causes LESS than 1.5 degrees of warming?

New Scientist and Nature magazine seem to have become the propaganda arm of the warm-mongerers. Easy to get your articles published if you have the right views and the right connections. But watch out if you dont have either!

Quote; And then there are the peculiar standards in place in scientific journals for articles submitted by those who raise questions about accepted climate wisdom. At Science and Nature, such papers are commonly refused without review as being without interest

… even though nothing in the hacked emails has been shown to undermine any of the scientific conclusions …

There’s plenty of evidence of poor methodology, haphazard approach to documentation, lazy and arbitrary archival systems and a general distaste for any outside scrutiny of any sort. In my mind those things greatly undermine the conclusions.

I’d argue there is nothing in the emails that proves the AGW science is wrong, but there’s nothing that proves the Easter Bunny is wrong either.

Its Abstract says;
“Over the course of the past 2 decades, I have analyzed a number of natural phenomena that reveal how Earth’s near surface air temperature responds to surface radiative perturbations. These studies all suggest that a 300 to 600 ppm doubling of the atmosphere’s CO2 concentration could raise the planet’s mean surface air temperature by only about 0.4°C. Even this modicum of warming may never be realized, however, for it could be negated by a number of planetary cooling forces that are intensified by warmer temperatures and by the strengthening of biological processes that are enhanced by the same rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration that drives the warming. Several of these cooling forces have individually been estimated to be of equivalent magnitude, but of opposite sign, to the typically predicted greenhouse effect of a doubling of the air’s CO2 content, which suggests to me that little net temperature change will ultimately result from the ongoing buildup of CO2 in Earth’s atmosphere. Consequently, I am skeptical of the predictions of significant CO2 induced global warming that are being made by state-of-the-art climate models and believe that much more work on a wide variety of research fronts will be required to properly resolve the issue.”

Lindzen and Choi (L&C0 conclude:
“ERBE data appear to demonstrate a climate sensitivity of about 0.5°C which is easily distinguished from sensitivities given by models.”

In other words, L&C say their analysis indicates that if atmospheric CO2 concentration were to double then global temperature would only increase by “about 0.5°C this is much less than the rise of between 3.5 and 6 °C the models suggest for a doubling of CO2.

However, their findings are from the tropical region and the feedbacks may differ at distances from the tropics. Therefore, L&C say;
“Following Lindzen et al. [2001], allowing for sharing this tropical feedback with neutral higher latitudes could reduce the negative feedback factor by about a factor of two. This would lead to an equilibrium sensitivity that is 2/3 rather than 1/2 of the non-feedback value. This, of course, is still a small sensitivity.”

So, when the different feedback magnitudes of non-tropical regions are considered then it could be that L&C’s determination of climate sensitivity would double from “about 0.5°C” to about 1 °C for a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentration. But that is still much less than is suggested by the climate models.

How about Stephen Schneider’s calculation on CO2 forcing?http://www.john-daly.com/schneidr.htm
We report here on the first results of a calculation in which separate estimates were made of the effects on global temperature of large increases in the amount of CO2 and dust in the atmosphere. It is found that even an increase by a factor of 8 in the amount of CO2, which is highly unlikely in the next several thousand years, will produce an increase in the surface temperature of less than 2 deg. K.

So, if New Scientist is willing to throw out all “denier” evidence because of a few errors, don’t they have to (to be consistent) throw out all AGW “evidence” for the same reason?

(Oh… why would they want to be “consistent”? Silly me, thinking you can reason with missionaries.)

The last time I read “Non Scientist” was last summer: The cover screamed “Ocean level rise: Worse than we thought!” That’s funny, I thought — the data maintained right here at the Univ of Colo (http://sealevel.colorado.edu/) shows sea level rise tapering off over the last several years — what can they be talking about?

What they were talking about is “new, improved” MODEL results showing accelerating sea level rise. Apparently, it never occured to them that if the MODEL disagrees with the MEASUREMENTS, then it’s the MODEL that’s wrong. (Even worse, they must think that their target audience is too dumb to know the difference.)

Too right, unfortunately I bought the latest Sci-Am to read about an astronomical topic within. Thumbing through, what do I see? The latest HS according to Tingley & Huybers. Nearly had an apopleptic fit but managed to recover enough to consign the mag to the recycle bin.

I should also add that the editorial page states that Sci-Am belongs to the “Nature” group of publications. Enough said…”fool me once…”

Within astonomical circles there is this debate going on re the Big Bang. The physics behind this is so ridiculous and contradictory asking us to believe that there was this time when the laws just didn’t apply. “Rulelessness”, they call it. Rubbish, I call it, yet it has assumed the same level of acceptance to some as AGW.

I subscribed to New Scientist for years and loved it but it just started to get so twisted and not just on climate science. Every story had some spin or other. I gave up in disgust and canceled it, just like Scientific American and Discover. I really miss science journals that honestly pursue truth, whatever it may be.

The Geological Society of America, of which organisation I have been a member for 25 years, is soliciting members for support of its position paper on AGW, which makes a VERY strong statement that – guess what? Humans are THE cause. Hard on the heels of that came my renewal form for a web-based, instant cash in hand credit card renewal of about $950 U.S. for the various publications I receive, membership dues, etc., etc. and all the other ancillaries.

After 25 years with an academic/professionbal society and a long publication record in its conferences, short courses, journals, I find it hard to contemplate abstaining, but I think I have to – along with a VERY strong letter explaining why.

As for things like New (Non)Scientist and Scientific American, I never read them anyway. I find the watering down, even in a good way, too uneven, and even well-meaning coverage ends up being spotty. Ever since the internet and ready access to the original research, I have left these Reader’s Digest, second seed, ex post facto, hand me down, periodicals on the airport bookseller shelves. Ditto TV viewing. I began boycotting Discovery Channel and History Channel and all those other so-called education channels years ago (1990 I think) when Walter Cronkite and Barbara Feldon (Agent 99) teamed up to host a very poor, one-sided, travesty of a documentary on dinosaurs.

Mark – apart from the climate, of which we geologists are the keepers of the paleoclimate record (or in Mann’s case, the losers of the record) the big controvery we have is whether the dinos (and other life) were actually wiped out by an asteroid or other bolide. Outside of geology, of course the “science is settled” and it was a big rock what done ‘em in. You should have seen the in-fighting 20 – 30 years aog on that one when it was a trendy topic and research $$$ was available for the first time for dinosaurs since the 1920s. And, yes. There were the “in group” of the Alvarez, et. al supporters and the deniers – sound familar – Gerta Keller of Princeton Univ among the notables in the latter class. It is still going on today and it is a worthy bit of research and the “sceptic” circle is attracting more and more adherents.

The difference of course is that the Gross National Product of the First World Nations is not jeopardized by whether dinos were wiped out by a single unfortuante accident or whether their evolutionary race was simply run (in case you’re interested, I have never accepted the catastrophist explanation – not when the extinctions began 300,00 years before the bolide impact and when there have been discoveries of dinos AFTER that event).

The moral is that things were pretty nasty for a while but the science DID finally begin to settle itself out (far from “settled” yet). I think there is just too much $$$ in AGW and too much political motivation to leave science on its own to make its own bed.

Copenhagen, in the aftermath of ClimateGate, proves that there is politcal will and greed behind this whole thing and that the science is simply irrelevant. It has taken me the better part of a week to force myself to even begin to accept this and steel myself against whatever statements the US’s fearless leader will make later this week.

“Mark – apart from the climate, of which we geologists are the keepers of the paleoclimate record (or in Mann’s case, the losers of the record) the big controvery we have is whether the dinos (and other life) were actually wiped out by an asteroid or other bolide.”

My theory of this, is that a big meteor broke the Earth’s crust, released absolutely humongous amounts of methane and perhaps other hydrocarbons, which then oxidized to CO2 and Water either by burning or biological processes. While doing this, it reduced the O2 percventage in the air from 35% to the present 20.9% – raised the ocean levels 400 feet, and the dinosaurs, who were adapted to high oxygen ratios, died out fast. Meanwhile, mammals, who evolved in the only cold places on the Earth during the high o2 period – the mountains – were adapted to thin air. So they were not affected to the degree that dionsaurs were.

Birds with teeth all died, a separate family of birds wiithout teeth – high flying birds adapted to thin air – lived and are with us today.

I call this “The Last Gasp Theory”. I published the original version in the usenet user groups in 1998, but without the extinction mechanism fully worked out.

I have hardly ever seen you get angry, but the sheer intellectual ferocity of your article is like being hit by a thousand pound bomb. If I were the editor of New Scientist, I would be cringing behind the desk with knees a-knocking.

Sandbags aside, I think you have not only demolished NS pathetic stance, but you have reminded them what hard science looks like.

As a now ex reader of NS, it is painful to see how they have attempted to suppress Real Science. In doing this, they have seriously betrayed the trust of both the lay public and concerned scientists the world over.

I think I know how you feel. I’ve crossed Sky and Telescope off my regular magazine list as a few months ago they did a “proof” job on the Warming by an obscure ‘science and technology writer’ whom I’d never heard of.

The article snootily dismissed any alternative view and failed to note the last few years of cooling. My decision wasn’t difficult as Sky and Telescope has become increasingly “touchy-feely” over time.

Likewise! I also read and subscribed to New Scientist since the very early 1960′s
Earlier this year I did not bother to renew my subscription and told them exactly why, their sheer dishonesty and the outrageous advocacy of the unverified and unverifiable runaway global warming / climate change due to the so called green house CO2.
Because of this blatant advocacy of global warming and all the hyper-ventilating about the supposed anticipated disasters from rising CO2 levels that New Scientist is bent on promulgating at every opportunity, none of the other “research” that New Scientist now publishes can be regarded with anything but a deep suspicion that it too is being distorted or twisted to suit the New Scientist agenda.
Add their recent apparent editorial policy of publishing the equivalent of “I was taken by little green men and saw the end of the universe” articles dressed up in a science sounding cloak and all their verisimilitude is long gone.
It is very sad to see this happen to what was a fine weekly, trusted scientific news source that I so looked forward to with great anticipation and read avidly from cover to cover for over 40 years.

Much has been made for the last few decades of the “Greenhouse Effect” and the “Enhanced Greenhouse Effect” a.k.a. “Man Made Global Warming”. So, let’s review:

Let’s start from basic principles, let’s follow “A Day in the Life of a Global Warming Photon”;

1. A Photon of Visible Light (a.k.a. Sunlight) arrives on the surface of the Earth. Nothing spectacular here, this happens all the time when the Sun is shining.

2. This Photon is either reflected or absorbed by the surface of the Earth. The visible reflected portion is not of much interest to the Man-Made Global Warming Hypothesis, so we will ignore it for now.

3. This absorbed Photon raises the temperature of the Earth by a small amount, no dispute here.

4. The warmer Surface of the Earth then releases some Infrared radiation, no dispute here. The energy content of this emitted radiation is LESS THAN OR EQUAL TO the amount absorbed. As a result the Earth cools by an amount equal to the energy radiated.

5. This infrared Radiation MAY be absorbed (the chances are about 450/1,000,000) by a molecule of a “greenhouse gas” in the atmosphere, no dispute here.

6. This molecule of a “greenhouse gas” will be warmed by a small amount, no dispute here.

7. This warmed molecule of “greenhouse gas” will emit something less than 50% of this energy back towards the surface of the Earth as infrared radiation, no dispute here. As a result the molecule cools by an amount equal to the energy radiated.

8. Some of this infrared radiation emitted back towards the surface of the Earth will be absorbed by the surface and thereby warm it, (ignoring for a moment that some is reflected), no dispute here.

9. The surface of the Earth having been warmed by the radiation reflected by the “greenhouse gas” will thereby re-emit this as infrared energy back towards space, no dispute here. The energy content of this emitted radiation is LESS THAN OR EQUAL TO the amount absorbed. Note that the “Man-Made Global Warming” Hypothesis clearly admits that a warmer surface of the Earth emits infrared radiation, see step 4 above. As a result the Earth is cooled by an amount equal to the energy radiated.

10. This infrared radiation emitted back towards the cold vacuum of space MAY again be absorbed by a “greenhouse gas”, the chances of this occurring is now (450/1,000,000)*(450/1,000,00).

11. This cycle continues ad-infinitium…

12. Simply calculate the following equation to find the chances that a Photon is forever “trapped” by the alleged “greenhouse effect”; chances of being “trapped forever” = 450^N/1,000,000^N, where “N goes to infinity”. N represents the number of times a Photon is absorbed/reemitted by the surface of the Earth and is ALSO absorbed/reemitted by a molecule of a “greenhouse gas”.

13. The chances of an individual photon being absorbed by a “greenhouse gas” TEN times is:
450^10/1,000,000^10 = ~ 3.4×10^-34 = 0.000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,34 !! (I have to admit I counted the zero’s several times, but I may be mistaken by a few)

14. So, as N approaches infinity the chances of a Photon being “trapped” and forever after causing a “permanent warming” of the Earth quickly approaches NOTHING, or as we in the engineering field used to call it “ZERO POINT S–T OVER INFINITY”.

15. Oh, by the way this simple calculation ignores the fact that something less than 50% of the energy absorbed by the “greenhouse gas” is emitted back towards the surface of the Earth.

16. A more accurate equation is: 0.50^N*450^N/1,000,000^N, which for N=10, is even WORSE at ~3.3×10^-37, hurry up and add three more zero’s.

17. The value of 450 (“greenhouse gas equivalent” in ppmv) is largely immaterial, it could be 100ppmv or 5000ppmv, the outcome is the essentially the same. The chances of TEN “greenhouse gas” absorptions at “100ppmv” = 1×10^-40, the chances at “5000 ppmv” = ~ 9.8×10^-24. Either way, that’s a WHOLE LOT OF ZERO’S

18. In Fact, even if the concentration of “greenhouse gases” in the atmosphere is 100% (BTW, we’d all be dead) the chances that a photon is ”trapped” and forever after causes a “permanent warming” of the EARTH is: 0.50^N*1,000,000^N/1,000,000^N, for N=10, this evaluates out to 9.8×10^-4. This case does of course become more complicated since no clear path from the surface of the Earth to the cold vacuum of Space exists. So there are many more absorptions and reemissions occurring, each of which emits more energy to space.

19. This final example is in fact the situation present inside a man made greenhouse. Glass replaces the “greenhouse gas” in the atmosphere. Last we checked common glass is the same as a 1,000,000 ppmv “greenhouse gas”. In this case the glass is partially heated by the infrared radiation reflected from the ground. It then radiates from both surfaces of the glass (inside and outside), 50% to space, and 50% back towards the earth. In the meantime the restraint of convection causes the temperature inside the greenhouse to climb, until the Sun goes down.

So in summary, we can suggest a few salient points:

As predicted by the laws of Thermodynamics, no heat is ever “trapped” in the atmosphere of the Earth.

The surface of the Earth (a.k.a. A WET ROCK) is not particularly well known for its intelligence. It is not capable of figuring out if it was heated by visible light, or by infrared light reflected from a “greenhouse gas”. Regardless of how it was heated the Earth emits this heat back towards the cold vacuum of space as infrared radiation, WITHOUT ANY NET GAIN IN ENERGY CONTENT, resulting in a cooling of the Earth.

The fact that some of the Thermal Insulating Gases surrounding the surface of the Earth are heated only by conduction and convection (Oxygen, Nitrogen, etc.), and other gases are heated by conduction, convection and the absorption of infrared radiation is INCONSEQUENTIAL! All of these gases participate in a huge heat transfer problem which still follows all of the Laws of Thermodynamics.

Note that all of these absorptions and reemissions happen within time frames of microseconds, or less. So the thought that heat has been trapped and will show up in a decade, or two decades, or one hundred years is RIDICULOUS !!

So the final result of a change in the proportions of gases heated by convection and conduction versus the gases heated by convection, conduction and radiation is that the response time of the climate of the Earth is ever slightly slower as “greenhouse gases” increase. Since the ultimate forcing function is the rising and setting of the Sun these changes are overwhelmed by the Sun. Of course, there are likely to be other physical processes identified (i.e. the cosmic ray – cloud connection) that may expand our current understanding of the very complex system known as the “Climate of the Earth”.

Further, we should discuss empirical observations. Much has been made of the observations of many events including the retreat of some glaciers, the alleged unusual melting of icecaps, delayed seasonal snowfalls, extended droughts, etc. etc. In general, empirical observations should not be used as a substitute for a sound, logical explanation of a physical effect. Empirical observations may be used to reinforce or refute a proposed logical explanation of a physical effect. IT CANNOT BE STRESSED STRONGLY ENOUGH THAT AN OBSERVED CORRELATION BETWEEN OBSERVATION “A” AND OBSERVATION “B” DOES NOT IN ANY WAY PROVE THAT “A” CAUSES “B” !! Or for that matter, THAT “B” CAUSES “A”.

If the “greenhouse effect” does indeed exist, we should expect Man-Made Greenhouses to slowly heat up and eventually reach a “Tipping Point” and burst into flames. Of course this presumes the doors are kept closed to contain the hot air. Little empirical evidence of these observations exists. However, perhaps the government should immediately start a program to indentify our oldest greenhouses and prepare plans to open the doors everyday before people get hurt? This would of course align with the precautionary principle.

Finally, yes, we know that a photon is defined as the smallest unit of light. We are aware that 50% of a photon is not a meaningful unit, but the logic of this argument is still sound. If you are concerned about this, you can rephrase this logical argument in Step 1 as: “a flux of 1 photon per second arrives on the surface of the Earth”. The conclusions are not changed. The original logic was written to make the sequence of events more readable.

Oh so true
Once worked for the BC Ministry of Environment. Where science clashed with green policy, science lost. Back then M. Mann and the hocky stick was the truth. To me it had the odour of over due fish.

[...] writing in very straightforward terms to reach a wide audience. She hits the nail on the head with her post on New Scientist. Her commentary could apply to many writers in the mainstream media. Take note: the mainstream [...]

Great article and I love the cover. I used to get New Scientist and was a member of the American Chemical Society for years. AGW was just too much for me to stomach so I quit. And Yes my name is on “the 31,000 volunteer scientists petition”

I guess it is a matter of institutional inertia. As the sand erodes under your feet, you just get more shrill as you keep claiming that you have the AGW high round. Sad really. There are many institutions and publications founded on the highest ideals whose founders are gone and they are presently run by activists who simply are not equiped with the integrity to change their minds when the facts change.

Re: Dean Turner (Dec 16, 2009 at 7:11 am) who asked:
> Is there any paper with empirical evidence
> that shows Co2 causes LESS than 1.5 degrees
> of warming?

I guess you are unaware of the findings and conclusions of the Earth Radiation Budget Experiment (ERBE). It was a NASA program, easily found by a web search.

“The Earth Radiation Budget Experiment (ERBE) Satellite Results Recently Proved That When The Earth Heats Up It Emits More Radiation Thus Falsifying the Simplistic Greenhouse Models used in AGW Hypothesis.”

From a series of interviews with Christopher Monckton (by Michael Coren):
~”As the Earth warms it radiates more heat into space. Why is that important? The entire case of the AGW Alarmists is based on one false assumption that is built into all models is that as the world warms then less outgoing radiation will escape into space. That is contrary to reason and elementary physics. The computer models are told this wrong assumption. The Earth Radiation Budget Experiment (ERBE) Satellite measured that more radiation gets out into space when the Earth warms. We now know that more radiation escapes and if it escapes it’s not heating the Earth.” – Christopher Monckton (paraphrased).

Dean, Dean, Dean, your mind must be too closed for ERBE and its conclusions to register on your conscious mind.

Try being a scientist. We gladly discard impoverished theories for ones that better describe the real (un-fudged) data. What happened to your zeal for the core-beliefs of the scientific method? I’m not married to any theory, and will gladly dump the inferior ones for the improved ones! How about you?

Come-on, Deano! Get back on the wagon of scientific skepticism! Real scientists question everything until it’s proven to all, with all data and methods, formulas, and algorithms confirmed by lots of other scientists, even the skeptics, critics, and competitors!

Nice work Jo. Agree with the commenter above, who noted the measured ferocity of your prose. NS ought to be ashamed. I also note you’re getting a lot of links from other sources – hope that translates into increased traffic!

Dear CyberForester, I’m open to any critical analyses of my explanation of the “greenhouse effect”. Please be critical, I think I have a strong argument, but I would appreciate any “peer review” to bolster my explanation.

This the reason I cancelled my subscription 12 months ago. I could not stand the one sided approach to this particular topic. Being a none practicing engineer, the incorrect and impossible articles that had on alternative energy just pained me to read.

All I asked was a simple question and I got a simple answer. Why are you taking this opprtunity to beat me into submission when I am not diagreeing with you? Your condescending tone does not impress me.

I was interested because joanne has often stated that there are no empirical studies that show Co2 causes any warming but then she asked an AGW zealot in another thread to provide a reference to a study that showed empirical evidence for Co2 causing more than 1.5 degrees, which made me ask the question.

Perhaps you need to pay closer attention to what I actually said without putting words in my mouth.

Are you angry about this obvious fraud and the national media’s complicity in the cover-up, misinformation, reframing and misdirection of the issue and the related “carbon derivatives” market Obama’s Administration is spinning up? Take responsibility and take action. STOP all donations to the political party(s) responsible for this fraud. STOP donations to all environmental groups which funded this Global Warming propaganda campaign with our money, especially The Environmental Defense Fund. They have violated the public trust. KEEP donations local, close to home. MAKE donations to Oklahoma’s Senator Inhofe, the only politician to stand firmly against this obvious government/media coordinated information operation (propaganda) targeted at its own people. People that government leaders and employees are sworn to protect. WRITE your state and federal representatives demanding wall to wall investigations of government sponsored propaganda campaigns and demand indictments of those responsible. WRITE your state and federal Attorneys General demanding Al Gore and others conducting Global Warming/Climate Change racketeering and mail fraud operations be brought to justice, indicted, tried, convicted and jailed. Carbon is the stuff of life. He (Obama) who controls carbon, especially CO2, controls the world. Think of the consequences if you do nothing! For one, the UK is becoming the poster child for George Orwell’s “1984” and the US government’s sponsorship of this worldwide Global Warming propaganda campaign puts it in a class with the failed Soviet Union’s relentless violation of the basic human right to truthful government generated information. Given ClimateGate’s burgeoning revelations of outrageous government misconduct and massive covert misinformation, what are the chances that this Administration’s National Health Care sales campaign is anywhere near the truth?

It is difficult to tell what happens to a graph when the line stops but is covered by several other lines. Just part of the trick to hide the decline. NO worries though it is only hard working tax payers trillions of dollars.

I’m not too perturbed about New Scientist. It’s a commercial publication and gives its readers what they want. If the pendulum swings and their readers become sceptic its editorial policy will change to reflect this.

What is much more worrying is the fact that organisations like the Royal Society, the guardian of scientific standards in the UK for 350 years, should take a stand on the issue.

In 1960 Edward Lorenz of Chaos Theory fame asked, “Does the Earth have a climate? The answer, at first glance obvious, improves on acquaintance.”

Due to “sensitive dependence on initial conditions” (the so-called “butterfly effect”), Lorenz asserted that any “complex system” –one with three or more interacting variables– will be non-random but indeterminate: Non-linear, neither amenable to detailed analysis nor capable of extrapolation in any form. In other words, long-term “climatic” changes in Earth’s ultra-complex atmospheric system are mathematically impossible either to model or predict.

That said, Earth does in fact exhibit stable “climatic regimes” on geological time-scales. But in contra-distinction to blinkered ideologues masquerading as objective, rational investigators, “climate” is not an atmospheric but a geophysical phenomenon.

First posited by Alfred Wegener in 1912, confirmed only in 1964 by deep-ocean (“bathymetric”) surveys, we know today that plate tectonics, Wegener’s “continental drift”, arbitrarily configures continental landmasses in ways that substantively determine global atmospheric circulation patterns and convection currents. When Gondwanaland concentrated all landmasses in south polar regions, Earth experienced a 500-million year pre-Cambrian Ice Age. For three hundred million years before the Pliocene/Pleistocene boundary some 1.8 million years ago, continental dispositions in temperate equatorial regions seemed to have permanently foreclosed Ice Time.

Since the Cretaceous/Tertiary (K/T) Boundary 65-million years ago, Earth has experienced five major geological eras averaging 14 – 16 million years. On this basis, our current Pleistocene Era has 10 – 12+ million years to run. Since the Pleisocene is characterized by well-defined, cyclically recurring 102,000-year ice ages punctuated by interglacial epochs of a median 12,250 years, this pattern should continue for 6 – 7 times its present duration.

On a plate tectonic basis, periodic Pleistocene cold spells reflect a central geophysical rather than astronomical (solar irradiance) or atmospheric (convection-current) fact: To wit, that conjoined North and South American continents wall off Earth’s eastern from her western hemispheres, resulting in rhythmic “climate pulses”– glaciations. When continents eventually disperse, opening world oceans to global circulation once again, the frigid Pleistocene will devolve to more benign regimes for many another hundred-million years.

The latest Pleistocene glaciation lasted from c. 116,400 to 14,400 years-before-present (YBP). From BC 8800 to 7300, however, the median 12,250-year clock was reset 1,500 years by the so-called Younger Dryas “cold shock”, a glacial rebound precipitated by cometary/meteorite objects impacting Earth per disruption of Sol’s enveloping Oort Cloud (qv). Originally due to end about AD 500, coincident with the Fall of Rome, our current Holocene Interglacial Epoch, Earth’s benevolent “long summer”, has been rescheduled to terminate about AD 2000+(12,250-12,300) = AD 1950.

Geophysical time-frames are never overly precise… but as of AD 2010, as we enter an extended “dead sun” period without sunspots, either a 20-year Dalton Minimum or a 70-year Maunder Minimum could tip Earth abruptly into an overdue onset of Ice Time. Most certainly, “anthropogenic global warming” (AGW) citing industrial C02 emissions is a wretched political power-play, scientifically a meaningless canard. The fact that burgeoning populations absolutely require energy from coal, oil, nuclear-power facilities whose production has been willfully sabotaged by Luddite sociopaths for decades now, is a brutal harbinger of mega-deaths should Ice Time come again. Depend upon it, that is death-eating Environmentalism’s stated goal.

“Global Warming”: There is no science. Mathematically, there can be no linear extrapolations of any kind, on any basis whatsoever. Those who pretend otherwise are uniformly Big Government hacks, poseurs intent on driving grant-money gravy trains. Blacklisting, conspiracy, fraud, active collusion with corrupt national and hyper-partisan, tyrannical UN elitists is their stock-in-trade. This opening decade of the benighted 21st Century will be cited as an object lesson in destructive self-delusion for generations, probably for as long as Western civilization lasts.

In the to first point against “the deniers” New Scientist mention Peter Laut and his comment on Henrik Svensmark’s graph. Svensmark replied that he had properly used data available at the time for the publication, and then Laut wasn’t able to disprove this in his followup.

But the peered reviewed paper by Laut and Damon was a disgrace, where they slandered Svensmark and Friis-Christensen as pop stars …or something like that, seeking fame and fortune with no interest in science whatsoever. That was kind of fascist!

Also Laut and Damon in this paper “proved” IPCC’s CO2 hypothesis (which they call a theory) with a little help from the MBH98 hockeystick graph and its correlation with CO2. A major paper, isn’t it!?

Laut’s paper is a disgrace for science in every possible way — but later it was revealed that Peter Laut has had been well paid for the preparation of attacks on Svenmark. Also a bit later, after Laut’s document and public critics against Svensmark, Laut was invited to IPCC where he was publicly greated by IPCC:s chairman for his efforts to attack Svenmark. (The fascists gathering.)

New Scientist also in their second point has Svensmark’s (at the time of publication correct) graph and theory as the issue.

I also agree that New Scientists points against deniers has nothing to do with the Climategate, but it has a Laut-gate, I think, which is also against IPCC.

It’s however interesting that these kind of fascists concentrate their efforts so much on Henrik Svensmark. It shows what they are afraid of. Other scientists than Svensmark has shown a >99.5% significant correlation between cosmic rays and low level clouds (Palle et al. 2003). (IPCC says Palle uses too few instruments, but that’s irrelevant criticism due to available instruments and homogen data, and they also criticize that Palle’s data isn’t consistent with other less direct — I think not better — different data. Then IPCC, as they use to do, just conclude they can ignore Palle, as they conclude they can ignore Svensmark etc; IPCC:s without empirical reason reinforced warming models are Almighty God and the AR4 is the message to the human race.)

Also look at this paper by Palle, very well explaining the increase in temperature in the 1990s, until 2001:

Dean…. since there are no papers that show empirical evidence that CO2 causes more than 1.5 degrees of warming, then it stands to reason that ALL of the papers show evidence that CO2 causes less than 1.5 degrees of warming.

Just sent them an email telling them they have lost my subscription. I have been swearing about the alarmism for months now – the family don’t hang around when I read it any more! Unfortunately I have a 2 year subscription with 11 months to go, and I don’t think I can get any of that back.

Out of 42 replies so far only 2 were in Google’s favour. And one of those was written by a Google employee and it was awarded best answer even though it only received 1 vote. The majority of other replies received between 11-25 votes.
They have the gall to put themselves first in plain sight. So when you click on the forum title you only get the ‘best’
reply and that is the biased one from Google. You then need to click on another link to get the complete list of comments.”

I believe your first issue rates right up there with the vast majority of other “peer-reviewed” journals about this new-fangled movement that most are now calling “climate changeology”. And to be candid, I LIKE it!

Just look at the title: “NonScientist”. Can’t be any more truthful than that. And the yellow header “Why Scientific Fraud is really OK” right next to a smiling Goracle. How absolutely appropriate; he’s smiling with complete acceptance. To the right of his beaming head is “Climate Change: Our favourite religion”, which discounts any possibility that it is based on anything tangible. The subheaders are very effective, too: “We defend corrupt scientists & attack unpaid volunteers”, which gives us an excellent expose` of your modus operandi (where do I contribute?). But really, you kept the best for last: “It’s the last place you’d expect to find logic and reason”. Amen, amen, and amen!

I believe this covers deserves the nation’s highest recognition and reward for accuracy in journalism and bravery considering the well-oiled machine arrayed against you. You have absolutely NAILED the whole anthropogenic global warming scam and hung it around the neck of it’s largest spokesman. OUT-STANDING!

Now, will you have follow-up issues featuring Michael Mann and Phil Jones? They can be searching through the forest for that one special tree–not for Christmas, heavens no!–they need a special tree again to skew the data. I’d also love to see a center-fold devoted just to Gavin Schmidt. In a bikini, of course, since this winter is turning out to be such a hottie. Brrrrrrrrr.

But why is there suddenly a threshold of 1.5 degrees? I though the entire purpose of this blog was to show in great detail how the AGW Co2 theory was utterly flawed. Going along with the idea that Co2 can cause up to 1.5 degrees of warming is just admitting that humans are influencing the climate and gives warmers a way to rub our noses in it.

“2. Provide ONE paper with empirical evidence that man-made carbon dioxide causes or is likely to cause more than 1.5 degrees of warming. OR Admit you can’t do it and your frequent claims that there is a great deal of evidence are wrong.”

Post-Normal Science: The reason why climate alarmists do what they do.

In order to understand why researchers Michael Mann, James Hansen, Phil Jones and Keith Briffa, et al, behave the way they do, one must understand Post-Normal Science (PNS). Never heard of it? Most people haven’t, but it is being used right under our noses

This new pseudo-science is what the AGW (Al Gore Warming) alarmists have been using to cook the books for years. PNS was invented by Marxists Silvio Funtowicz and Jerome Ravetz, that characterizes a methodology for cases where “facts are uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and decisions urgent”. It is primarily seen in the context of the debate over global warming where information is sparse.

Normal science uses the scientific method which is a slow methodical iterative process that builds upon facts and observation to generate theories and models. PNS, on the other hand, is an outcome based method used to arrive at predetermined conclusions in a hurry, facts be damned.

From Wikipedia: “Detractors of post-normal science see it as a method of trying to argue for a given set of actions despite a lack of evidence for them, and as a method of trying to stifle opposing voices calling for caution by accusing them of hidden biases. Many consider post-normal science an attempt to ignore proper scientific methods in an attempt to substitute inferior methodology in service of political goals.”

“Climate Change and the Death of Science” which was written a month before Climategate happened is here.

Joanne. Thanks for another great post! I also cancelled my subscription to NS last year and told them why. I am amazed that there are so many commentators here who have done the same thing. It would be very interesting to find out what is happening to their business model. Presumably, since everyone who disagrees with their stance on AGW is leaving them they are left with the believers and therefore pander to them, shamelessly. Now all they need to do is change the name of their publication and leave out the word ‘Scientist’. Certainly there is room for a ‘real’ scientific publication now – as so many of you have pointed out, SciAm seems to be going the same way….

Dean Turner:
December 16th, 2009 at 3:18 pmThe amount of times he held up his book like it was a holy document was breathtaking.

Well Dean, that is because Plimer’s book contains over fifteen hundred footnotes to actual published scientific papers. Monbiot is a journalist, obscuring and filibustering. Plimer is a scientist, holding up his evidence…. Now does it make sense as to why he held it aloft as Monbiot talked over him?

I’ll give one example from Plimer’s book. He notes a paper that shows a semi tropical planktonic diatom occurring in the sediment records of the south western Baltic sea. That diatom disappears from the sediment record around 1260…. which would show that the Baltic sea was warmer prior to 1260 and has cooled since. Considering that Diatom does not live there now, an obvious conclusion can be drawn that it still cooler in that region now, than back then.

Plimer is not saying that the Baltic can’t warm up again. What he is saying is, that this part of the Baltic sea was warmer in an earlier period, which the AGW Scientists are saying could not have been, because the present is the hottest for thousands of years. Plimer is in effect showing evidence that refutes their claims.

Do you want to accept that scientific Paper that Plimer was holding up in his book, showing past recent warm periods Dean, or do you want to Deny the Scientific paper and its implications?

These are the choices that you are now going to have to face. You are about to be taxed on a flawed hypothesis. You can continue to close your eyes to evidence….. Or you can accept and change your mind and reject any imposition on CO2, now that you have the facts

WOW I haven’t visited the New Scientist web site in awhile.SAD
You really nailed it Jo. Did Aliens kidnap all the real editors,in the
anglophone media? Time to revisit the “Education Systems” of the west.
Scrap it and start over.

Sorry for mistaking you for a DENIER of truth.
If you take a minute to self-examine your post topic, the sequence is:
1. You point out Joanne Nova (the great!) asked the AGW / GW folks to provide a paper

“with empirical evidence that man-made carbon dioxide causes or is likely to cause more than 1.5 degrees of warming. OR Admit you can’t do it and your frequent claims that there is a great deal of evidence are wrong.”

2. You asked her and us

“Is there any paper with empirical evidence that shows Co2 causes LESS than 1.5 degrees of warming?”

Joanne’s basic point in her post is that the AGW/GW crowd asserts that temps are rising without bound, and that is due to CO2 increasing, which is due to wealthy countries burning fossil fuels, et cetera. Based on their claim, they want all governments to agree that rich nations should be taxed and the money sent to poor UN countries (with rampant skimming and graft like with the UN’s “food for oil” program).

Since they are making assertions and trying to compel actions, it is “on them” to defend the assertions.

The reason I assumed you are a DENIER of truth is because your tactic was to avoid answering her question by turning it around on her, and asking her to defend the opposite of the AGW/GW claim.

That trick is both fatuous and a common tactic of liberals who lack proof of their position.

DLKuzara #62 explained in his “Post-Normal Science” references that the tactics of the AGW/GW folks are take directly from Marxist theory and thought. Forgive me if I thought you were one of the AGW/GW folks when you employed the reverse the question and attack the questioner taxtic that is straight out of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals.

The bottom line is that Joanne, nor any of the rest of us, have tried to assert radical new theories that are used to extort money like a mobster protection racket–”Nice climate; pity if something should happen to it”–to fund world-wide socialist change.

Joanne has nothing to prove. Jones, CRU, Mann, Penn State, et al, have a lot to prove! Govt climatologists who produce the “official” data in Australia, New Zealand, UK, and of course, the US EPA, NASA, and NOOA have a lot of explaining to do, after they yield to the FOIA requests, cough-up the data, and answer the questions that will come from more than Stephen McIntyre when we get to tear into the real data and CRU / Penn State software source code.

I think you guys may be missing an essential point here. The journalists are more corrupt than the climate ‘scientists’. (By the way, climate scientist is now a bigger oxymoron than “military intelligence”. )

The journalists love global warming – I mean, climate change. It sells subscriptions. It pulls in readers. They are panicking more than the climate charlatans are.

The journalists do not care if it is true. They do not care about the damage to our global economy. They care about their own paycheck, then their own reputations, then readership.

And let’s face it: without the unprofessional bootlicking behavior of most science ‘journalists’ the AGW scam would have fallen apart years ago. AGW violates basic physics. There are plenty of places on the internet to see the discussion of this, complete with math.

“Why do we [New Scientist] know greenhouse gases are the main cause of warming”.

There is still a lot of [Scientific] uncertainty about the extent of future warming –
estimates of the effect of doubling CO2, including all feedback processes, range from 2°C to 6°C.But the big picture is clear.

Is it possible that tens of thousands of scientists have got it wrong?
It is incredibly unlikely.

So it is a scientifically uncertain, but politically correct theory, then.

Kevin thanks so much for this. When I first came to this site I tried to go through this by myself and got hopelessly balled up in step 5 through 10. I most likely overly complicated things because I was focused on the following.

I believed the IR that is reemitted would most likely not be at the same wavelengths it was absorbed at. So my thinking was that the reemitted IR would most likely be absorbed by some other IR absorber i.e. water vapor which absorbs at nearly all IR wavelengths not just discrete bands as is the case with CO2. If my thinking is not flawed that would mean that once a photon was absorbed at an absorption band of CO2 if it were reemitted it would occur at a lower energy than what it was absorbed at i.e. at some other wavelength. This reemitted IR would then not be reabsorbed by another CO2 molecule because it would not be at an absorption wavelength of CO2.

All I am saying is that Plimer didn’t come out looking very good after the debate. I make no mention of his science. He let Monbiot get the better of him. Not everyone is good at debating, as debates are seldom about facts, more about personalities and whomever is best at persuasion and charm.

That is how it (mostly) works in good science, but that’s not how it works with public opinion. Whoever shouts their message the loudest and for the longest wins. AGW has been promoted relentlessly by those too stupid to understand that it’s a crock of sh!t.

Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth did more for the pro AGW scientists and governments than they could have ever asked for. This hoax is far from debunked. In fact, I’d say it will never be debunked, the same as what happened with DDT and CFCs. People still don’t realise that neither of those posed any kind of threat to the environment but they still got banned.

I think, as time goes on, it will be increasingly difficult for the UN & IPCC to ignore the problems with the AGW theory.

I think that is the reason why, over the last couple of years, we have been bombarded with Green hysteria. Someone high up in this issue is concerned. I think they’ve noticed that not a lot is happening right now temperature wise. I mean how plausible is it that 1998 can stay the warmest year on record in the face of increasing CO2 emissions.

They know that if they don’t ram this deal through soon, it might never happen.

Just watched Plimer vs Monbiot and wanted to commit a crime. It would seem George got away with what was basically a bluff, and then twisted the knife like a politician. Says a bit about the disneyland he lives in though – that he isn’t confident enough to read a graph by himself. George is spoon fed, it’s just that he doesn’t know that hand that feeds as well as he should.

Great article.
I sent NS an email telling them that they don’t deserve a title clearly misleading the buyer to think that the magazine has much to do with science, and that I would no longer spend money on buying it.
No answer, but no matter.

Great article JoNova. I subscribed to N-S for many years and wish I could cancel again but I let my subscription lapse two years ago for the very reasons that you have pointed out here. Besides the obvious and unscientific posture on global warming I felt that they were becoming overly political overall and were losing their scientific objectivity. I began to mistrust what I was reading and realized I was paying too high a subscription price for such frequent frustration.

The reason [Gov. Palin] has called on president Obama to shun the climate summit in Copenhagen is not because she’s suddenly come out as a global warming sceptic, but because the [AGW] theory which underpins the package of measures being discussed there has lost its validity as a result of the Climategate scandal.

Take it one step further. Why are they selling us the idea of global warming? Follow the money trail. Next they will charge you for air and water…A GOD GIVEN. Smacks of elitism. This magazine was obviously bought by Rockefeller or Bush. Global control. And there’s more to come. Scientist credibility has vanished from the face of the earth and someones pulling the strings. Oh I could say a lot more……!!

I quit reading NS a couple of years ago when it became apparent the quality of the publication was becoming diluted. Jo Nova’s parody is brilliant and hits all the right buttons. I’ve sent links to every sceptic I know (and there are quite a few). I’ve been reading this blog for some time and thought it high about time I made a comment to show my appreciation for common sense logic. Thank you Jo.

…….. Yes I agree Dean, Prof. Plimer is not accomplished at presenting TV entertainment… He is after all, a scientist and lecturer. Mr Monbiot of course, is a very accomplished presenter of propaganda. Which really shouldn’t have mattered, if the Interviewer presenting both of them, had been impartial and allowed Prof. Plimer to make his points uninterrupted. You are right indeed. The media have let us down mightily.

On a flying visit from WUWT. Excellent article Joanne, loved it. I used to be a subscriber to NewScientist but had to give it up as the warming silliness just got too silly. I so much want to see cooling just to see what the NS will say!

“I believed the IR that is reemitted would most likely not be at the same wavelengths it was absorbed at. So my thinking was that the reemitted IR would most likely be absorbed by some other IR absorber i.e. water vapor which absorbs at nearly all IR wavelengths not just discrete bands as is the case with CO2. If my thinking is not flawed that would mean that once a photon was absorbed at an absorption band of CO2 if it were reemitted it would occur at a lower energy than what it was absorbed at i.e. at some other wavelength. This reemitted IR would then not be reabsorbed by another CO2 molecule because it would not be at an absorption wavelength of CO2.

Would appreciate any thoughts on this.”

Ray I’ve been reading some textbooks on Physical Chemistry and Atmospheric Radiation; I had the same question about the absorption and emission wavelengths just a few weeks ago. Let’s say the CO2 molecule absorbs a photon at one of its absorption peaks 4.3 microns, it becomes vibrationally excited and is like to undergo a number of molecular collisions before it re-emits, these molecular collisions affect the vibrational energy quite weakly, but affect it they do. The excited CO2 molecule can either gain or lose (transform) a small amount of energy as translational kinetic energy during these collisions. There is a probability the excited CO2 molecule will re-emit a photon with a slightly different energy (wavelength/frequency) than the photon it absorbed. This phenomenon is called impact pressure broadening, there are other forms of spectral broadening (natural and doppler). In a nutshell, it means the emission spectrum is slightly broader than the absorption spectrum; the same amount of energy is distributed over a slightly wider range of wavelengths.

And don’t forget! Photons have momentum, momentum must be conserved! This has important implications for the direction of the re-emitted photons.

Hi Jo… I attempted to post an email to new Scientist along the lines that I have 2 Msc’s, a Phd (Statistical Modelling) and undergraduate degree + 23 refereed papers and that my dad was an eminent meteorologist/Physicist (3 papers in Nature in the 40 and 50′s) and that they have become a rag susceptible to fraud. Of course it was not put up. LOL To all you deniers out there, don’t worry it ain’t gonna warm up hahaha. From what I see (see analysis of current contitions), there is a massive cooling occurring starting now probably due to inactive sun refer to Svensmark (even NOAA agrees with this). That is, winters in NH and even summers in SH (Just look at South America) in analysis of current conditions its been like this for 2-3 years every day!http://wxmaps.org/pix/temp4.html hahahaha

Great article, and Anthony sent me.
I watched the Monbiot/Plimer debate – Monbiot irritated me greatly, using slick debating practice rather than honesty. He has been spoon-fed so vigorously that he only recognises the shape of one spoon in his mouth. I find his pseudo-religious views to be anti-science unless the ‘science’ agrees with his religious cause.
I have never found ‘New Scientist’ very appealing and gave up on ‘Scientific American’ years ago due to it’s ‘preachy’ tone, which never sat well to sceptical seekers of knowledge.

But why is there suddenly a threshold of 1.5 degrees? I though the entire purpose of this blog was to show in great detail how the AGW CO2 theory was utterly flawed.

That is a good question.

The answer is that the mean global temperature of the Earth rises by ~1.8 degrees C from July to January each year and falls by the same amount from January to July each year. And it does this every year.

So, there can be no reasonable suggestion that a rise of mean global temperature by less than 1.8 degrees C will be harmful because – each year – it is observed that such a rise (and fall) has no discernible effects.

And 1.5 degrees C
(a) is significantly less than 1.8 degrees C
and
(b) is a convenient datum with a ‘safety margin’.

Hence, those who wish to scaremonger about AGW need to demonstrate that AGW can and will cause a rise in mean global temperature greater than 1.5 degrees C.

To date, all empirical evidence indicates a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentration will raise mean global temperature by less than 1.5 degrees C (e.g. see my reply to you at #9).

I hope this answer is clear.

Additionally, I object to the attacks on you because you ask questions. Please keep asking them. We all learn when we discover we can not answer a question.

If you haven’t read this yet, you might want to. Richard Black, a climate reporter and blogger at the BBC (and therefore an expert by definition) seems to think you are an aberration because you are a skeptic and a woman. I can only conclude that he thinks women should all subscribe to same kind of postmodernist pseudointellectual claptrap that he does.

What an astonishing set of comments under that NS article. If anything, their commenters seem more sceptical than on, say, Climate Audit. And to think that a great number of sceptics would have, like me, given up on NS years ago, and would not bother commenting there.

Hardly anyone outside the editorial circles of this and some other media seems to want to defend the Climategaters. There really aren’t many people inside that circle of wagons.

They are calling Jo an aberration I would suspect because they are losing and she landing some good hits. You can also see it in Monbiot’s general aggravation. Sceptic noise is getting right into their heads and they hate it. AGW beliefs can only be sustained by what we used to call in the Army “pissing in each others pockets”, separated from scrutiny. They are in a state of high anxiety because ther is far too much contrary info out and about.

JoNova, I was sent here by Anthony Watts. I enjoyed the trip, especially reading those peer reviewed articles on spotted quolls making windfarms and Bono flying a coconut-powered plane 2 meters.

I don’t bother with NS any more, ignore anything from Sci Am on global warming, and take Nature and Science on AGW with a huge pinch of salt. I don’t think ClimateGate ended the AGW debate but it did reveal an unhealthily influential clique of alarmists.

I think we’re watching the mainstream media commit suicide. Lovely stuff, I’ve had enough of Pravda style gushing over establishment machinations to last me several lifetimes. Lets take this thing down

Sent by WUWT. Excellent content as usual.Keep up the pressure in Aus. I used your handbook as a guide for a talk to my son’s teenage friends- they were somewhat surprised there was ANY doubt re AGW theory.

The recorded temperatures on Earth vary between -89C and 58C – a massive 147C. Spearfish South Dakota once warmed 27C in two minutes. Many places have a 10-20C variation every day. Yet somehow Greens expect us to believe that life on Earth will end if it warms more than 2C.

[...] up their position as the king-tide sweeps away any journalistic credibility they might have had. New Scientist becomes Non Scientist « JoNova __________________ "What are you doing here, I? thought I killed you yesterday!" [...]

Im going to sit in the middle for a while, there is no clear evidence that there is stuff going down.
Yet, things seem far from perfect. I think the key is a balance.There needs to be some changes in the free enterprise system & in western economic thinking.

I too have arrived here from WUWT. I’ve been sitting on the fence on this whole debate for years but this last week I’ve reached breaking point. Nothing to do with the dodgy science or dodgy emails but I’m just fed up with ‘Climate Change’ this and ‘Climate Change’ that every five bloody minutes in the media. Arrrggghhh!
I had a black T-shirt printed yesterday with the words “Climate Change Denier” in huge letters across the front. Thing is, I’m just a bit too nervous about going out in it! What do you all think?

I have observed, and occasionally subscribed to, the pseudo-science rag in question over many years. To be frank it has long tended to a “progressive” (marxoid/greenist/statist) bias. Look at the classified ads section and see how many are from the state or quasi-autonomous sector. In effect this is the “Guardian of popular science” and is politically indistinguishable from that newspaper.

The majority of New Scientist articles tend to be provocative and/or sensationalist dross which wouldn’t bear genuine peer review for five seconds, but readily find a home in its pages. In short its articles characteristically lack substance. Article titles are invariably gimmicky and childish, in dumbed-down BBC fashion.

The final straw for me was its slavish, relentless, devotion to the cause of the Great Global Brainwashing. Science simply doesn’t come into it.

However, then you look at the Scientific American. In contrast the majority of its articles are substantial and authoritative. Except when it comes to climate, when the magazine drops all pretence of scientific integrity and worships at the feet of the new world junk science religion.

It’s quite a heavy read, but essentially he suggests the following to break the impasse between warmaholics and coolies.

Put your money where your mouth is, by putting a tax on carbon, BASED ON GLOBAL TEMPERATURES.

That way, if the world doesn’t warm, taxes will be low, may even disappear if globe cools. But if it gets warmer, as the alarmists predict, then taxes will rise in tandem.
He suggests a tax as low as 5c for a gallon of fuel etc

#121 — an interesting idea but the core issue here is uncertainty, and there is likely to be as much social disruption from a cooling ice age as a heating meltdown. We need resilient societies for any likely scenario – hot or cold.

My humble opinion is that we have absolutely nothing to worry about warming, in fact I hope we do. Mankinds history demonstrates a flourish in health wealth and knowledge building during times of warming.

Cooling is a whole different kettle of fish. Has always caused disease and poverty and the ruinations of key civilizations.

I contend that rather than “give” developing nations money, which only makes them more beholdin to the west, we should make available the cheapest form of energy we have. So that they can build infrastructure around that available energy. (rather like give a man a fish…. teach him to fish etc)
Afterall, the developed world prospered on the back of cheap energy, why deny that to the others.

I started getting concerned when the Ozone Hole was blamed on CFC’s when the hole was located near one of the poles. I thought that just looking at CFC’s and not looking at all the other natural processes first was stupid. Then recently I have learned that the Magnetosphere is weakening. This would mean that more radiation from outer space could get through. Most would be absorbed by the atmosphere of course but what effect would these changes have? Then Al Gore started promoting his own brand of alarmism and suddenly AWG was the cause celeb. If the World is warming the question that should first be asked is this a good thing or a bad thing. Personnaly I think warming overall is good as it leads to longer growing seasons a more diverse bio-mass and on and on. Instead we are given visions of doom, why? I personnaly believe the best use of resources would be to plan on what would need to be done if the predictions of warming are true rather than trying to modify a process that we have real little understanding of. It could be that Man has actually retarded the next Ice Age by releasing Carbon Dioxide and that if the AWG crowd gets thier way it could actually be the trigger that causes real climate damage, we just don’t know. This is the hubris I am concerned about. wouldn’t it be better to plan for the worst while continuing to try and understand what is happening rather than trying to stop something that probably cannot be stopped if it is occurring at all?

You shouldn’t insult perfectly usable HS. I have 7 horses I take care of. They produce a lot of HS. Compost that and apply it to your garden and you get produce like you wouldn’t believe. For example, my four tomatoes plants this year produced well over 100 lbs of organic tomatoes that would cost between $2 and $5 a pound at the supermarket and taste ten times better. The interesting thing is during the “hottest decade on record”, it was too cold for one of the tomato plants to hold its blooms. So I had only three plants actually producing. They kept producing until the hard frost we had in early December. I still have about 20 lbs of green tomatoes ripening on my kitchen counter.

I wrote the authors the following note, “Your sampling technique selected data for which temperature changes in time are proportional to temperature, or weighted them, and this technique could show nothing but exponential growth in time at some time, but the first thing your critics will challenge the moment they see it, is the lack of appearance of the MWP, and your analysis does not nullify the known temperature changes in both North and Southern hemispheres over the period.”

Here’s the succinct response I received from these now (im)famous authors:

Just wanted to say hello to all you in Ozland. Over in the mother country it’s freezing! -3.0c when I got up at 7.00 but it’s warmed up to 3c now. Whole of the UK affected, with biting east winds coming in tomorrow and talk of 4 inches of snow for the east of the UK. So if you have any relatives in East Anglia, Lincolnshire, Suffolk, etc. then send them a pic of a hot Oz day – they’ll like that. The whole of Europe is damned cold with even Spain (Madrid) just 2.0c today.

I ended my subscription to NS some 7 or 8 years ago after they started focusing their attention on fad science and printing only the most sensationalised stories. I think in retrospect that my decision then was the correct one.

I don’t know how their circulation figures have looked over the ensuing years, but judging by the number of booksellers who carry their publication here in the States, I’d guess that it’s been on a steady decline over the past few years. Just as with the newspapers, when you start printing what only half, or less, of the possible customers want to read, it’s really not unlike taking a kukri to one’s own throat.

Mike W: post 90
Let’s say the CO2 molecule absorbs a photon at one of its absorption peaks 4.3 microns, it becomes vibrationaly excited and is like to undergo a number of molecular collisions before it re-emits, these molecular collisions affect the vibrational energy quite weakly, but affect it they do. The excited CO2 molecule can either gain or lose (transform) a small amount of energy as translational kinetic energy during these collisions. There is a probability the excited CO2 molecule will re-emit a photon with a slightly different energy (wavelength/frequency) than the photon it absorbed.

This is kind of the crux of the issue for me. If I take a co2 sample and put it in an IR spectrophotometer and run a scan the instrument passes a beam of IR through the sample and scans the IR wavelengths passing through. If CO2 reemits the IR at the same wavelength is that not that the same as no absorption at all? How can an absorption band be detected if CO2 is reemitting at the same wavelength? It would seem that reemitting at the same wavelength would be precluded.

It would seem to me that the CO2 would absorb IR at any one of its bands 2.7, 4.3, and 15 micrometers. Absorption takes place as a consequence of double bond bending and stretching there are no electron orbital shifts involved. I would think that this absorption would be converted to heat due to the increased vibration and then the CO2 molecule might reemit IR but if it did it would do so as any other black body IR emitter over all the IR wavelengths.

I have been a regular reader of New Scientist for about ten years. It used to be a good, non-partisan compendium of what was new in the world of science. In recent years it has become a soap box for social engineers on the Eurocentric left. Climate change is a biggie, but so is evolution, or moreso the need for evolutionists to stamp out American creationists. It also takes on pet causes popular with Europeans such as concocting lame reasons as to why the Canadian seal hunt should be banned. I recall one piece on a legal case in North Dakota involving abortion rights and I wondered, what the *%^# has this got to do with science? It really was an indicator that the editorialists had gone off the deep end. Nowadays the magazine is an opinion piece by “rationalists” as they like to call themselves. At least it makes for a quick read.

All the people in positions of influence have to flow with the madness of crowds.

Interesting thing – I wrote one, just one, post on my blog about Global warming, and was promptly dumped by about 50% of readers.

Trouble is, when you are boss fella of a chemical society, or a professional group like the engineers professional registration society, or the doctors & GPs society, or whatever – if yo don’t fall in line with the mainstream views you get pilloried. So you shut up about what you really believe and parrot out the BS to keep the majority of readers/members happy and to avoid controversy.

It’s a bit like reading some Morris West – where there is an overwhelming desire expressed in the Catholic Church to avoid “Scandal”. (He should know, being as I understand either educated by, or a former Jesuit). A diversion I know – but its the same everywhere else. Avoid scandal. Toe the line. Keep a low profile.

I think the term for what you describe is the “Heuristic of availability”, which I think basically means that a commonly held perception must be correct.

Here’s an example, if you got 5 people in a room and told them the white lines in the middle of the road are usually around 3 metres in length, most, if not all of them would tell you you’re talking rubbish. If you took it to a vote, the consensus would be that you were wrong.

It’s always harder to re-educate someone who has come to a conclusion on a matter. Egos come into it. A telltale sign that an established belief is under threat is when people start to resort to underhand tactics – like Clive “Gobels” Hamilton, for example. When people resort to these sorts of tactics, you know they have doubts about their stance. Think of a cornered pig.

Just keep the tone of things down and try to calm people that go off railing against it. I would be targeting things like the censorship around the issue, or something like that. It’s not their fault that the Lamestream media has let them down, after all.

Thanks for the good work, jo anne. Here’s my own comment posted to the New Scientist article. It will be interesting to see if they will delete it.

“The censorship of dozens of responses to this article is consistent with the Global Warming fraudsters’ usual modus operandi. The article makes numerous ad hominem attacks against the skeptics, but it does not argue the science.
The dishonest scientists at CRU and their allied labs were caught red-handed falsifying data, refusing FOI requests, and denying access to the peer review process to qualified scientists. They should be prosecuted as the law requires. Global Warming is a hoax, and unfortunately many scientists have priofited by promoting that hoax.”

I do not believe that the wavelength of radiation reemitted by the “greehouse” gas really matters. It is absorbed by the Earth’s surface. The surface is somewhere between say -25C and 50C, and the peak wavelength of the blackbody radiation emitted by the surface lines up with one of the absorption bands of the “greenhouse” gases. So even if the radiation emitted by the gas is at 14 microns it still heats the Earth’s surface and the surface acts as a blackbody radiator at -25C to 50C.

If you plot the spectrum of a -25C blackbody and a 50C blackbody you should see that there is very little difference in the shape or magnitude.

Yes,the absorbtion and remission of infrared radiation by a gas is not really an absorbtion, it’s termed “Resonance Radiation”. (reference: Fundamentals of Optics, Jenkins and White, ISBN 0-07-032330-5, page 462)

“If I take a co2 sample and put it in an IR spectrophotometer and run a scan the instrument passes a beam of IR through the sample and scans the IR wavelengths passing through.” I think the key here is that the instrument you describe measures the transmitted radiation. It is probably not designed to measure the “back radiation” reflected back by the gas. But that is not my particular area of expertise, so I could be mistaken.

Ray! I was just thinking about this, I wish I could remember where I came across the explanation but it implied that the re-emitted photons are scattered off the transmission axis such that they are no longer “seen” by the spectrophotometer, hence less energy observed at that wavelengths and the apparent ‘absorption’. Seems ok….I don’t know about you but that explanation still leaves me a bit unsatisifed.

Kevin, I just checked out a few working definitions of “resonance radiation”, and it seems to dovetail with “stimulated emission” which is something i’ve been looking into. I’ll see if I can find Fundamentals of Optics.

Patrick @ 99Black’s article and the observations framed therein, could be tipped another way. Why are such a large proportion of the believers women? Could it be that the way AGW has been marketed has been tailored to appeal to women? Has the IPCC’s market research identified a particular way to appeal to women?

We should then look at how we can make the message of the skeptic more appealing to women. Perhaps the factual and reasoned arguments from science do not resonate so much with women. Maybe we have to inform them that the beloved offspring and future generations are going to live in abject poverty because they will be burdened with taxes thought up by a corrupt, unelected global body?

Now, the liberals are going to stone me for being condescending to women and sexist.

Mike, Stimulated Emission is a little different than Resonance Radiation. Stimulated Emission is the basic physical property that enables lasers to produce intense radiation that is all in phase. As an electron is energized to a higher energy state it passes other electrons in the gas (like Helium-neon) and “stimulates” them to a higher energy state as well. These other gas molecules emit light when the electron returns back to a lower energy state. All of this emited light is exactly in phase, is the same wavelength and goes in the same direction. This is what makes lasers so useful.

Note that a laser does not generate more energy (light) than it consumes. So it also follows the laws of thermodynamics. See Jenkins and White page 632.

I’m not familiar with the setup of the spectrophotmeter you are refering to, but scattering may indeed mask the reemitted radiation. Since these instruments are not designed to measure it, they may not “see” it.

@ Ray Hibbard, I thought of something else; a kinetically hot-gas with no external source of radiation will not emit as a blackbody, it only emits at the absorption/emission wavelengths of its constituent molecules and atoms. I believe stars are an exception and emit blackbody because they are optically oqaque and have a well defined surface (go easy on me guys!).

Fundamentals of Physics is on loan, Google and Wiki are giving me squat.

There’s some information floating around the web that suggests stimulated emission may have relevance for the natural, physical processes that go on in our atmosphere, and I’m asking myself if it’s relevant for IR and CO2, I know Einstein’s didn’t have lasers in mind when he developed the theory of stimulated and spontaneous emission, but I’m not sure he had the troposphere in mind either.

Stimulated emission is only revelant when an already exited molecule is induced to emit by another photon incident upon the already excited molecule right? Rather special set of circumstances, yeah?

In any case, what I can appreciate is that both the energy and momentum of the absorbed photon needs to be convserved. Isotropic re-emission appears to destroy the momentum of the absorbed photon, unless its hidden or carried away in the brownian motion. I can’t find anything on this (non) conservation of momentum, its just waved away in most explanations of the process!!!

The President of the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a climatologist.

NAS reviews the budgets of all federal research funding agencies.

NAS has used research grants to train scientists the way Pavlov used dog biscuits to train dogs.

What a sad, sad state of affairs for science.

Prof. Manuel, I wish to state, “Thank You” for stopping by and adding your comment to this important matter before Us…I hope you will continue to join Us in this endevor..Your experience and knowledge would “always” be of value to all.

Howdy, I am a denier, I admit it. My logical analysis of the alleged “greenhouse effect” tells me that this hypothesis is STILL unproven. This is REGARDLESS of any amount of peer reviewed literature
which alleges that the hypothesis is proved.

History is full of peer reviewed literature that allegedly proves a hypothesis. At one time the consensus was that lobotomies were an effective treatment for mental disorders. In fact the “doctor” that perfected the lobotomy operation was awarded a Nobel Prize for his efforts. Currently no credible medical professional would prescribe a lobotomy for anything, including erectile dysfunction.

Good Science relies on: positing a hypothesis, sharing ALL data, algorithms, analyses, and doubts about the hypothesis. ONLY after anybody can replicate the observations is the hypothesis accepted as a theory. Even then it is open to modification based on future learning’s. Note that something as simple as the Theory of Gravity is still subject to modification; Newton’s original hypothesis was modified by Einstein’s work.

Is there a specific point in my analysis (see post #25) that you would like to discuss ?

Howdy, just reviewed my post about stimulated emission of radiation. I mistakenly stated that the stimulated light all travels in the same direction. This is incorrect, it travels in many directions, but it is the same wavelength and phase. An external cavity is necessary to cause the light to be collimated and then travel in the same direction. In a gas laser this function is provided by the parallel mirrors at each end of the gas filled tube. In a semiconductor laser this is provided by the surfaces of the semiconductor device. The higher refractive index of the semiconductor material versus the lower refractive index of the surrounding air acts like a mirror.

History is full of peer reviewed literature that allegedly proves a hypothesis. At one time the consensus was that lobotomies were an effective treatment for mental disorders. In fact the “doctor” that perfected the lobotomy operation was awarded a Nobel Prize for his efforts. Currently no credible medical professional would prescribe a lobotomy for anything, including erectile dysfunction.

Wait a minute. You mean … that a frontal lobotomy is not a cure for erectile dysfunction!? Ok now I’m pissed!

Mike W and Kevin: I am getting the impression that we are talking about reflected IR in one instance and absorbed IR in the other. That would explain my confusion. And now that I give it some thought a CO2 mol that was already excited might not be in a position to absorb but could still scatter. I need to hunt this down in any case because it has gnawed on me long enough.

What we are witnessing is “scientific deconstructionism,” in which scientific statements are no longer distinguished from other kinds of statements by reference to external, verifiable facts. The reason? There is no such thing as a verifiable fact.

One of the basic tenets of postmodernist linguistic deconstructionism (which I learned how to do in my postgraduate studies at Vanderbilt) is that all text is tainted by bias and that objective points of view are impossible. Hence, the objective of expression is to exercise power. (Formerly the type of expression so designated has been confined, mostly, to those of history, literature and politics. But now we see that even mathematics may be considered biased and subjective.)

Hence, there is no such as thing as objective truth and statements are never more than propositional in nature. A statement’s truth content is never more than opinion, and opinions are nothing but expressions of power. Therefore, in a basic sense, all speech is power directed.

Now if climate scientists – products of universities co-opted by modified Marxism since the 1960s – find that their only paying customers are statist bureaucrats, and most of the scientists were taught beginning as undergraduates to believe that ideology, what do you think will be the result?

The result is that climate science will be subordinated to political goals. This is exactly what has happened. What we are seeing, I think, is that linguistic deconstructionism has polluted its first scientific discipline.

What this means is that when climate science became dominated by the Left (well, it began that way), then its purpose was not to determine scientific truth, but to use science to exercise political power. A standard Leftist critique of the West’s standing values was that they were social constructions, not rooted in objective reality (which does not exist, anyway), but in class struggles.

If scientific objectivity is a fraudulent concept, it does not mean that science is of no value. It simply means that science is just another tool for the class struggle and that it can be used on the right side of history. Like any other expression, scientific expressions are therefore concerned not with facts but with power.

Power is the goal. When global warmists mount ad hominem attacks against skeptics, most of us see those attacks as tacit admissions of failure of the scientific argument. But the Left does not see them that way since the scientific argument is just a specialized form of power expression. Ad hominem attacks are, too, and so are just another tool in the toolbox of power plays. They are an attempt to change the terms of the battle (and battle it is.)

Why is anyone surprised by this? We now have a perfect troika of incestuous behavior: The government invents a crisis, Provides grants and funding to scientists who verify the crisis, The journalists jump on the bandwagon to report on the crisis and keep their ratings up. Whats sad is that scientific endeavors that show promise will be placed under the same suspicion that the AGW fiasco has engendered. We hear about the runaway greenhouse effect and how it will destroy the planet. When the planet was formed, the atmosphere was 100% CO2. By current analysis of scientists that support AGW, the planet should have gone into a runaway greenhouse effect and stopped the formation of life as we know it.

The exposition on your blog is very illuminating. I’d begun to suspect that environmentalism had deeper roots than were obvious but never had a way to fill in the details. That Earth Day is also Lenin’s birthday is frightening.

When you spend 8 plus hours 5 plus days a week working it’s a little harder to go searching for information. That I’m home right now recovering from an injury has given me a golden opportunity!

I agree with you that linguistic deconstructionism has allowed rhetoric to replace reasoning as the chief value of an argument. In the public arena, all discussion has come to be regarded as mere opinion and the superiority of facts and sound logic has been deposed. Fools who do not understand the value of superior logic and fact-finding think that scientific truths should be determined by a vote of the majority.

However, the abandonment of truth in favor of propaganda and the flagrant use of faulty logic is not at all a habit of the left alone. In fact, the Global Warming movement has been led and funded by wealthy elitists and industrialists who have hijacked the environmental movement to serve their own right-wing agenda.

The profligrate elitist billionaire Al Gore is no socialist or communist. NASA, at the heart of the Military/Industrial Complex and the Global Warming movement, is not a leftist or Liberal institution. Contrary to the Greenpeace propaganda, Exxon’s CEO, Rex Tillerson, stated his support for the Global Warming movement in 2007. Today most of the oil companies and industries have taken a stand in favor of the Global Warming movement. International banking is fully committed to the Global Warming cause, as exemplified by the actions of the IMF and the proliferation of brokered carbon-trading schemes.

The wealthy ruling elite of the Western world have commandeered the left-right paradigm to control the dialectic. Like Coke and Pepsi, very similar beverages sold in red, white, and blue cans, in the USA the Democrats and Republicans offer the voters a superficial choice, but the Dems and Pubs both slavishly serve the interests of the ruling elite. Both staunchly support US Imperialism, predatory capitalism, and the racist colony of Israel.

Interesting take on how (somehow) the global warming movement serves a right-wing agenda. Well, only if you count Hugo Chavez and ilk as right wing. However, most people consider fascism to be far right, but modern Leftism is pretty much indistinguishable from fascism.

However, your point that global warmism is bent to serve the moneyed interests is well put, since pretty much anything the UN involves itself in does that to the exclusion of everything else. The moneyed interests involved, of course, are the UN functionaries themselves.

Then there is Dr. Takeda Kunihiko, vice-chancellor of the Institute of Science and Technology Research at Chubu University in Japan, who says that the whole point behind the global warming (aka climate change) scare is to keep “Europeans in the driver’s seat and developing nations walking barefoot”? Which is probably why at COP15 the developing nations are screaming bloody murder. Or perhaps it’s because they’re greedy kleptocrats who just want hundreds of billions of dollars of Euro-American money.

Good of you not to forget hypocrite in chief Al Gore, the first global warming billionaire, whose CO2-emitting lifestyle beggars description. But he assuages his carbon profligacy by buying carbon credits from …. himself.

As for the CEOs of the corporations you name, any free-market advocate knows that once a company achieves a certain market share, it becomes very much anti-capitalist because capitalism means competition. You think, for example, that Bill Gates wants competition? The only CEOs who praise competition are the ones who haven’t yet achieved market dominance. So why would those named CEOs embrace the global warming movement? For the same reason Willy Sutton robbed banks: that’s where the money is.

So what is COP15 actually designed to do (and fortunately, spectacularly, failing miserably)? It’s designed to cement the status of the global warming elites.

What the Copenhagen treaty will do is set up a new nomenklatura of bureaucracies and factotums and commissioners, providing them with near-unlimited political power, a luxurious lifestyle and upward mobility for their children and political allies. If you think this sounds like the old Soviet system writ global, you’re right.

Too bad, though, that you hate Jews, since the one bright spot in the whole Middle East is Israel. Have you ever been there? I have, and also deep into the West Bank, meeting privately with both Palestinian Christians (heavily persecuted by the Palestinian Authority) and West Bank dissidents (darn few in number since they tend to have fatal “accidents”). But I’ve learned that there’s no use discussing this with anyone who refers to Israel as a “colony,” so I’ll not try further.

I’ll keep my response to you brief, since I want to show respect for this blogsite’s owner by not straying too far from the specific topic of the climate change controversy. Nevertheless, since the climate change controversy has been engendered by the politicization of science, we cannot reasonably discuss this topic without some reference to the ‘who and why’ of that politicization. Since many others have claimed that the Global Warming movement is a left-wing phenomenon, surely I deserve some space to explain why I believe it is not.

I repeat my assertion that the Global Warming movement serves a right-wing agenda. Carbon trading schemes award already-established industries with a monopoly on producing ‘greenhouse gasses’, and those established industries are entitled to sell their excess ‘carbon rights’ to other industries. Thus, carbon trading schemes guarantee an on-going monopoly to established industries and the wealthy owners of those industries. Meanwhile, the ordinary citizen is assigned a tiny and highly restrictive ‘carbon allowance’, in addition to an added tax burden to support the costly ‘green’ infrastructure.

In spite of the fact that the USA’s wars of aggression are an enormous waste of natural resources, the leaders of the Global Warming movement never recommend ending those wars to reduce Global Warming. If they were leftists, they would recommend ending the USA’s wars of aggression.

The leftist, socialist, communist, and Liberal ideal does not support wealthy elitists. I do not regard anyone who supports US Imperialism or predatory capitalism as a ‘leftist’ or a Liberal. The Democrat party is not leftist or Liberal. Neither are the Clintons or Obama.

I have never regarded environmentalism as a cause belonging entirely to either end of the political spectrum.

Yesterday I spent a couple of hours with two Christian Palestinians who grew up in Bethlehem. The woman explained that the Christian Palestinians and Moslems have always had friendly relations in Bethlehem, often joining in each other’s celebrations. The man told us that when he was fifteen he was caught walking alone one evening in Bethlehem by a group of Israeli soldiers. After examining his ID card, which identified him as a Christian Palestinian, the Israelis knocked him down and riddled him with bullets. As a result he is paralyzed from the waist down and confined to a wheelchair for life.

I stopped buying “Non Scientist” and “Nonscientific American” years ago.

But in the quoted NS “Deniergate” link they say, “In 1991, the journal Science published a paper by researchers Eigil Friis-Christensen and Knud Lassen,…” but do not say that “Science” is a peer-reviewed journal. But when they mention Laut’s criticisms, who “described his findings in a peer-reviewed paper…” they do mention peer-review. So either the peer-review process of “Science” is no good for letting the 1991 article be published, or peer-review is worth mentioning only when you agree with the article and want to appeal to authority.

They complain about a gap in the graph in “The Great Global Warming Swindle”. But as I recall, revised editions of TGGWS were made soon afterwards (I’m not sure if that particular graph was changed), after criticisms.

>I agree with you that linguistic deconstructionism has allowed rhetoric to replace
>reasoning as the chief value of an argument.

Well, yes, among the poorly educated.

>In the public arena, all discussion has come to be regarded as mere opinion
>and the superiority of facts and sound logic has been deposed. Fools who do
>not understand the value of superior logic and fact-finding think that scientific
>truths should be determined by a vote of the majority.

I think a lot of them aren’t really thinking about their thinking.

>However, the abandonment of truth in favor of propaganda and the flagrant use of faulty
>logic is not at all a habit of the left alone.

I would tend to agreewith you, but then your later definitiion of who is not leftists leaves me to think you are considering only Hugo Chavez and the Castro brothers in that group.

>In fact, the Global Warming movement has been led and funded by wealthy elitists and
>industrialists who have hijacked the environmental movement to serve their own right-wing agenda.

Quite an assertion. While some oil companies are now supporting the AGW cult, I don’t think they have quite ‘hijacked’ it. AGW’s fantasy agenda makes oil reserves last longer and cost more, and the oil companies don’t want to angre their customers, so it is sort of win-win for them to at least mildly support it, even if they know it is bunk, which I assume they do since they have hundreds of engineers working for them.

MAybe not from where you stand. He sure looks like one to me. Believes in a command economy, favors sounds over sense, wants to tell others what they should do – yup, a socialist. Socialism is a romantic notion, there is no rationality in it.

>NASA, at the heart of the Military/Industrial Complex and the Global Warming movement, is not a leftist or Liberal institution.

This is hilarious. Actually it is not NASA as a whole that has come off the hinges, but James Hansen. NASA is not a military organizaton, it was specifically set up to be civilian. The bureaucracy is scared to death of Hansen, they don’t know how to shut him up.

> Contrary to the Greenpeace propaganda, Exxon’s CEO, Rex Tillerson, stated his support
> for the Global Warming movement in 2007. Today most of the oil companies and
> industries have taken a stand in favor of the Global Warming movement.

See above.

> International banking is fully committed to the Global Warming cause, as
> exemplified by the actions of the IMF and the proliferation of
> brokered carbon-trading schemes.

Yup, them evil bankers are at it again.

> The wealthy ruling elite of the Western world have commandeered the
> left-right paradigm to control the dialectic.

I’d like to quote some one who once said : “… linguistic deconstructionism has allowed rhetoric to replace reasoning as the chief value of an argument. ”

Well, you rhetoric sounds state of the art for about 1973. It’s not the ‘wealthy ruling elites’ that are driving this global car crash, its a bunch of sociopathic researchers and air-headed journalists in concert with vast hoards of opportunistic politcians (but I repeat myself.)

>Like Coke and Pepsi, very similar beverages sold in red, white, and blue
>cans, in the USA the Democrats and Republicans offer the voters a superficial
>choice, but the Dems and Pubs both slavishly serve the interests of the ruling elite.

Actually Coke is just red and white.

I don’t know where you get this stuff, but it is pretty funny.

> Both staunchly support US Imperialism,

The only place I can think of that suffers from US imperialism, in the sense of having territory occupied that they want us to leave, is Cuba (Guantanamo) which is on a perpetual lease. I think we ought to leave just the same. In the case of Iraq, we wnt to war with them and they were conquered, so we can take a little time leaving.

> predatory capitalism,

Please. What the poor of the world need now is MORE capatalism, not less. The only places that are still poor in this world, are ones where capitalism has been restricted. Those countries that have been chaning from demand economies, including India and China, are growing at an astounding pace.

>and the racist colony of Israel.

I’m trying to figure out who Israel is a racist colony of. The European Jews who settled there after World War II? It’s certainly not a colony of the USA – they don’t do anything we want them to.

And of course, there would be no West Bank or Gaza strip for the Palestinians to make a state out of, if Israel had not won the wars instigated by their neighbors.

I don’t know if the Israelis are ‘racist’, but there seems to be far more political and religious freedom there than in their neighbors, such as the Saudis.

If it seems like the USA favors Israel over the tyrannical kleptocracies that surround it, rest assured that this support is endemic among the American people, more than their leaders. And from what I read, the Jews in the USA are far more critical of Israel than the general populace.

> I’ll keep my response to you brief, since I want to show respect for this
> blogsite’s owner by not straying too far from the specific topic of the climate change controversy.

You are trying to start a new trend here. I don’t hik it will catch on.

>Nevertheless, since the climate change controversy has been engendered by the
> politicization of science, we cannot reasonably discuss this
> topic without some reference to the ‘who and why’ of that politicization.

Which topic? Who the nuts and scientifically clueless are? They do a good job of identifying themselves.

>Since many others have claimed that the Global Warming movement is a left-wing phenomenon,
>surely I deserve some space to explain why I believe it is not.

So far your arguments, as I have perceived them, have mostly consisted in dumbing down the definition of ‘leftist’. But I know there are political conservatives who believe in AGW, but certainly not as many of them by percentage. Newt Gingrich is one, but he is a former history professor, so he probably believes a lot of things that sound likely, but are not factual.

> I repeat my assertion that the Global Warming movement serves a right-wing agenda.
> Carbon trading schemes award already-established industries with a monopoly on
> producing ‘greenhouse gasses’, and those established industries are entitled to
> sell their excess ‘carbon rights’ to other industries.

It’s a lot more complicated than that. There is a lt of trading going on between countries.

> Thus, carbon trading schemes guarantee an on-going monopoly to established
> industries and the wealthy owners of those industries.

Well, in the usa, there are not a whole lot of ‘wealthy owners of industries’ left. Most enterprises are public coporations, owned by millions of retired librarians and public employee pension funds. I own a small software business myself, but I have far more equity in mutual funds in my retirement accounts. As we watch socialism falling apart all over the world, i only wish I could put more money in my retirement accounts, although I suspect eventually the government may nationalize all or part of the private accounts – since it will be the only money left they haven’t stolen.

>Meanwhile, the ordinary citizen is assigned a tiny and highly restrictive
>‘carbon allowance’, in addition to an added tax burden to support the costly ‘green’ infrastructure.

Every dollar used by the government for any purpose, comes from private individuals. AGW is just another excuse to steal money from some people, and give it to others.

>In spite of the fact that the USA’s wars of aggression

I am trying to think of a US war of agression. Grenada?

I once stood on top of the World Trade Center. When I saw it fall down on live TV, I knew we were at war.

It may seem that the USA is aggressive by not condoning the destruction of Israel by its neighbors, but we also did not condone the destruction of its neighbors by Israel, at the points when they were winning their several wars.

> are an enormous waste of natural resources,

that’s what they’re there for

> the leaders of the Global Warming movement never recommend ending those wars
> to reduce Global Warming. If they were leftists, they would recommend ending
> the USA’s wars of aggression.

Actually President Osama I mean Obama babbled on and on about how we should be fighting in Afghanistan, not Iaq, until he was elected. Now he is trying to get our of Afghanistan as fast as possible, while the left is sniping at him.

Of course, we really should invade Pakistan, and clear out the tribal mess. If the Pakistanis cannot prevent people from within their borders attacking neighboring states, by international law other interested parties have the right to do so.

>The leftist, socialist, communist, and Liberal ideal does not support wealthy elitists.

Then there are no leftists anywhere in the world.

> I do not regard anyone who supports US Imperialism or predatory capitalism as a ‘leftist’
> or a Liberal. The Democrat party is not leftist or Liberal. Neither are the Clintons or Obama.

There is nothing special about money. Those who monopolize the expression of ideas or control the actions of a populace are just as hegemonic – or more – than ‘predatory captilasts.’ I’ve been to Cuba, where everyone is forcefully kep poor by a government of greedy Marxists. Their greed is for the power to tell others what to think and do – far more intrusive, and far more resented, than people who try to control money.

>I have never regarded environmentalism as a cause belonging entirely to either end of the political spectrum.

By your definitions, there is only one end to the political spectrum. Your airy fairy idea of a leftists is an angel, not a man.

>Yesterday I spent a couple of hours with two Christian Palestinians who grew up in Bethlehem.
>The woman explained that the Christian Palestinians and Moslems have always had friendly
>relations in Bethlehem, often joining in each other’s celebrations.

Uh huh.

>The man told us that when he was fifteen he was caught walking alone one
>evening in Bethlehem by a group of Israeli soldiers. After examining his ID card,
>which identified him as a Christian Palestinian, the Israelis knocked him down and
>riddled him with bullets. As a result he is paralyzed from the waist
>down and confined to a wheelchair for life.

It doesn’t quite sound right to me, but I wasn’t there. I don’t understand why they would shoot him for being a Christian Palestinian, but maybe you didn’t mean to imply that. Or if they were actually that evil, why they didn’t just kill him.

> I never said that I hated Jews. You did.

As far as I am concerned, you can hate anyone you want, for any reason you want. That is your business, not mine.

The basic idea of conservatism is that your life is your business, and I should do as little as possible to interfere in your life as I can. You are the one who is in the best position to decide what you want, how to spend your time and money, what to like and dislike.

You are the only one that is going to live your life, and you should have the freedom to live it as you like – and learn from what you choose.

Howdy, I may have confused things by a poor word choice. The infrared energy is absorbed and then reemitted by the molecule of gas. There is a very slight time delay involved. The emitted energy goes equally in all directions, Since the Earth is only on one side of the gas molecule it cannot absorb anything more than 50% due to the geometry involved.

The time delay is what causes the gas to act as a thermal insulator, insulators slow the flow of heat.

The infrared is not “reflected” that was a poor word choice on my part. Reflection occurs immediately, and the surface doing the reflection does not absorb any of the energy (assuming a perfect reflector). Most good mirrors reflect 95% plus of the incoming energy.

After the Israeli soldiers knocked the Christian Palestinian kid down and shot him eight times, one soldier kicked him in the side, breaking two ribs, and the soldier said “All that and you’re not dead!” Then they walked away. He was paralyzed, but he survived. Who knows why they didn’t kill him. Maybe they thought it was more cruel to let him survive.

Good article. Any American Chemical Society members- current or former- here? I have an Open Letter to the Board of the ACS asking that the “ACS Public Policy Statement on Climate Change” be revisited. The current policy is 100% IPCC. Pleas contact me at orgchemist2002@yahoo.com if you would like to see the Open Letter and sign on. I should mention that this Open Letter project was started at the ACS meeting in DC in August 2009, prior to “Warmergate”.

James Delingpole, the first UK mainstream media writer (for the “Telegraph”) to break the Climategate story, reported that:

“The Climate Research Unit (CRU) in the UK was set up in 1971 with funding from Shell and BP as is described in the book: “The history of the University of East Anglia, Norwich; Page 285)” By Michael Sanderson. The CRU was still being funded in 2008 by Shell, BP, the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate and UK Nirex LTD (the nuclear waste people in the UK)…the key institution providing support for Global Warming theories and the basis for the IPCC findings receives funding from “Big Oil” and the nuclear power industry.”

In 2008 the BBC film “The Climate Wars,” presenter Ian Stewart states that while James Hansen was employed by the JASON science think-tank in San Diego, California, an institution whose primary purpose is doing high-level research for the US Department of Defense, Hansen and his team developed the computer models that Hansen uses to model ‘climate change’.

James Hansen continues to work on his computer climate modeling as an employee of NASA. According to the “Intelligence Encyclopedia,”

“NASA and DOD joint research has propelled the advances that make air and space important military assets. NASA’s part in national security strategy is not as substantial as it was during NASA’s first 35 years of existence (during the space race), but it still plays an important role.”

None of the above appear to be ‘leftist’ activities. Quite the contrary.

Amazing, Phillips wrote that in March 2007. Two and a half years later (Dec. 2/09 to be precise), Hulme had a piece in the WSJ in which he claimed:

It is a false hope to expect science to dispel the fog of uncertainty so that it finally becomes clear exactly what the future holds and what role humans have in causing it.

While perusing the Climategate emails, I had previously spotted Hulme in a Nov. 97 E-mail, engaged in what was tantamount to an E-mail chain-letter effort to drum up support for an EU “Statement” – with a view towards influencing key people pre-Kyoto (not the least of which was the media!)

This was my first encounter with a “Non-Scientist”. Made me so angry, I started my own blog! And (like Jo), I concluded that this “fog of uncertainty” (combined with the “precautionary principle”) is nothing more than unmitigated, “pure, post-modernist poppycock”!

The ‘Precautionary Principle’ should work both ways. If a causal relationship between anthropogenic CO2 emissions and ‘climate change’ is uncertain, the ‘Precautionary Principle’ should restrain us from making drastic and impoverishing reductions in our energy usage to reduce CO2 emissions.

W.R. Pratt’s excellent article “CO2 The Debate is Not Over” explains why Big Oil and wealthy investors will profit from promoting the bogus theory of ‘Global Warming’ — starting on page 41 (near the end of the article).

This is the easiest question of all to answer but to some will be the least obvious. What is required of course is simply to ask the question, who benefits? Well, apart from those in a position to profit from trading in carbon credits, who are the real benefactors? The answer is BIG OIL / BIG ENERGY. At first glance this may seem like an odd claim to make but if you follow the logic you will soon feel the penny drop. Ask yourself this, how much has the oil industry suffered so far since the “AGW” screw has been tightened? At the turn of the Millennium, oil was being priced at $16 a barrel. Last year in 2008 it reached, after a steady eight year climb, a staggering $147 a barrel and although it has slipped back from this high in 2009 it is still holding at levels more than four times what they were in 2000. You may be thinking that this is just a happy coincidence for the oil industry and that they are trying their best to discredit the claims that CO2 is causing global warming because they have spent millions on scientific research to disprove the claims of the IPCC and the environmentalists. If you are one of these people who have drawn such conclusions then you have been a victim of a confidence trick. This is exactly what you are supposed to conclude from the fact that big oil is paying scientists to prove that CO2 is harmless. This form of trickery further enforces the fraud in the minds of those who have been duped from the start. It is a form of reverse psychology. The oil industry are controlling both sides of this fraud. This is how mass fraud is perpetrated. It requires careful control of both sides. The same is the case for all major wars and is how these manipulators have honed their skills of mass deception over the years.”

I have sent my final comment to a New Scientist article, in which I criticized their now mandatory policy that readers subscribe to the printed magazine after reading no more than three articles (for an unregistered user) or seven articles (for a registered user) each month.

This policy is most likely the death knell for New Scientist. Or more accurately, its suicide song.

I am heartened—yet saddened—by the comments on this website (it’s my first visit) from other current and former NS readers who have had the same trouble I’ve been having with that magazine: pseudo-science and an activist editorial policy that inflames and alienates readers. “Non Scientist” indeed.

One wonders if their mandatory subscription move is really justified financially, or if the parent company ([G]Reed Publications, Inc) simply has a policy to gouge, loot and bleed dry the publication before moving on to another one. Or as I noted in my letter, if advertisers on its website aren’t getting the click-throughs they desire, then it’s because the articles pander to the lunatics and turn off the more affluent, intelligent customer base they hope to attract. Even Vendicar Decarian is tolerable, but the runaway climate change fanaticism is too inflammatory and makes the magazine untrustworthy. As another reader here observed, it was once a great magazine founded on integrity but is now run by activists and sensationalists.

At any rate, I fully expect the New Scientist website and quite possibly the printed magazine to fail. Too bad certainly; but as others here note, maybe it’s about time. Darwin is proved correct once again.

Yes, I’ve bheen a subscriber for years to another science publication, “Science News” which used to be a weekly publication and now is twice a month. ERvery tuime they write something on global wamring, I cringe. I don’t think they realize that their lack of objectivity and professionalism on the issue of ‘climate change’ makes their more scientifically minded readers wonder about their accuracy in other topic areas.

If their writers and editors don’t understand basic physics and chemistry, or even the scientific method, what business do they have writing about science?

It doesn’t take a genius to realize that when the proponents of a theory offer ever more apocalyptic predictions while refusing to publish their data or methods, and call for the imprisonment of dissenting scientists, that there is something other than objective science going on.

Hansen, Mann, and Jones are obvioiusly lost in cloud cuckoo land. The Climategate emails just confirm it. Anyone taking their fabricated ‘data’ and ‘research’ results as real science instantly labels himself or herself as either uneducated, unintelligent, or unhinged.

How much longer will this AGW farce continue? Are the grownups here yet?

Unfortunately, no. Hansen stood up before a senate hearing and demanded that certain oil company executives who were speaking an opinion he didn’t like be tried for crimes against humanity. And not a single senator challenged him about it.

Two questions one might have asked him:

1. Who made you the arbiter of what constitutes a crime against humanity?
2. Exactly when did we throw the Constitution in the toilet and pull the handle?

How could he respond to those questions? It sure would be fun to watch.

This is an interesting and far-ranging (off-topic?:-) discussion. In general, the men exposed by Climategate are politically more to the left than those who have exposed them. Never mind New Scientist – Nature is a blatantly leftist rag – it used to be the world’s leading science journal. Now look at it: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v462/n7273/full/462545a.html
and then there’s the Guardian, another liberal paper full of arrogant left-wing pommie academics (I should know, I used to be one) putting down ‘deniers’. Whereas the best opponents of the global warming conspiracy (and yes, now we know it really is a conspiracy) tend to be on the right – Chris Monckton, James Inhofe, the Daily Telegraph.
There are exceptions. Alexander Cockburn has been a skeptic for years, standing against his comrades’ daft ideas as he often does:http://counterpunch.org/cockburn12182009.html

I’m going to try to write an article about the politics of Climategate. It’s going to ask whether the whole left-green mish-mash can really stand. Cockburn tries to blame capitalism for Climategate. I don’t think this will wash. Is it true that Al Gore has corrupted environmentalism? Would an alternative, anti-capitalist environmental movement have avoided spreading a pack of lies to terrify children and the simple-minded? Of course not – Earth First is MORE hysterical than the IPCC – the protesters at Copenhagen are complaining that the IPCC and the UN isn’t doing a good enough job of shutting down the economy? I used to be one of these protesters. Now I’m trying to figure out – what is it that makes us want to undermine this civilization, instead of promoting what is good about it? But I agree with Greg Fegel about Israel.

Since many of the comments on this website have characterized the Global Warming as ‘leftist’, that belief should be open here to criticism and discussion from commentators with a dissenting view, unless the ‘conservatives’ want to mimic the Global Warming proponents in practicing censorship.

Many conservatives label all ‘environmentalism’ as ‘leftist’, which gives the misimpression that all conservatives are ‘anti-environmentalists’, and that ‘environmentalists’ are always and only leftists. How many conservatives are actually willing to state, as some have done, that they are ‘anti-environmentalists’? I maintain that the ‘environmentalist’ ethic does not inherently belong to either end of the political spectrum.

Al Gore, who, with his wife, tried very hard to censor the music industry, and who has become a billionaire from the profits of the carbon-trading scam, which profits only wealthy vested corporations and investors, is not what I would call a ‘Liberal’. Nor is Barack Obama, who is continuing and escalating the same Imperialist foreign policy as his Republican predecessor.

Anytime you see the word ‘all’ in a sentence it’s usually a gross generalization.
I would not say that all environmentalists are leftist or liberal although a large majority of them do lean that way. I don’t even like these terms liberal, or leftist as I don’t believe their meaning to be precise enough and worse in other countries the meaning is completely reversed. I prefer the term statist or non-statist. That means the same thing the world over, and I think it is much more precise. To illustrate, I have often been surprised when someone tries to link what they call the conservative, right with Nazism. To my mind conservatives in the best sense of the word uphold individual freedom as a primary good, a non-statist point of view. The Nazis cannot be mistaken for anything but a completely statist political view point.

That said I think that it was not so much that the global warmers are statists but that the statists saw a means to affect their ends through the global warming mechanism. So I guess I am saying that the statists were drawn to the global warming side of the debate because it provided a means to more completely control and diminish the individual. I have seen statists state flat out that their greatest enemy is the individual. This has resulted in the global warming crowd being heavily populated by statists.

Very interesting debate about statist, right, liberal etc… Quite OT but it would seem to be an essential subject for the AGW debate because the whole thing has morphed into a belief system or meme from a scientific investigation – which is why it has become impossible for most people to debate it rationally. Whilst the ‘statist/non-statist’ spectrum does seem to exist I think one can also identify an environmental range of opinion s unrelated to this. The current ‘sceptic’ crowd embraces a very wide range of opinion which I expect to see fragment into a variety of groups as it becomes more mainstream…

the AGW camp chose, early on, “persuasion” by fraud, bombastic assertion, and intimidation as well as “cooperation” by force of government arms. They expected/demanded tribute from the populace via taxation and not to be held accountable for their actions. They willingly manufactured a fraudulent bases for petty politicians to use to grab more power and stolen wealth. THAT, my friends is statist to the core. I don’t care how much scientific jargon and spin they use to cover their tracks.

Undereducated people who never learned the standard definitions of the political ‘isms’ are apt to incorrectly lump fascism, socialism, and communism together.

Brad Jensen wrote that: “There is no question that the Nazis were a left wing, socialist, statist group.”

Jensen’s interpretation is definitely not in conformance with the standard historical view of the Nazis, who detested communists, and tried to violently eradicate them. Perhaps Mr. Jensen could explain to us why the Nazis, who he says were ‘leftists’, hated communists so much.

Statist beliefs and actions cross normal traditional political lines. For instance, I have to keep the Republicans out of my bedroom and the Democrats out of my pocket and away from my guns. The only professed non-statist political party in the U.S. is the Libertarian party. Unfortunately they have a bit of a distance to go before they are a contender for national office. We have had quite a few instances of late where the majority of the people were not well represented in Congress. Perhaps this will give the Libertarians the chance they have been waiting for, I don’t know. For the most part I view the politics in the U.S. as a distraction, kind of like “All Star Wrestling”. It seems when one party isn’t busy shafting us the other one is. I always try to vote in such a way as to produce maximum gridlock. I have found the less they do the better off we all are. If it were up to me I would send them all home on paid vacation along with a bonus provided they all go home, sit down, and shut up. If there were a “DoNutten” party I would work day and night for them.

Undereducated people who never learned the standard definitions of the political ‘isms’ are apt to incorrectly lump fascism, socialism, and communism together.
Brad Jensen wrote that: “There is no question that the Nazis were a left wing, socialist, statist group.”
Jensen’s interpretation is definitely not in conformance with the standard historical view of the Nazis, who detested communists, and tried to violently eradicate them. Perhaps Mr. Jensen could explain to us why the Nazis, who he says were ‘leftists’, hated communists so much.

That is what is being discussed here Greg, the definitions. You may have your ‘standard’ definitions of what fascism, socialism, and communism are but that does not change the fact that they all had one very common shared trait. They all subordinate the individual to the state. They also share a nasty tendency to kill a lot of their own citizens unlike non-statist political structures. Asking why Nazis hated the Communists is like asking why Hitler hated the Jews, who the hell can know. All three were personality cults to one degree or another, the personalities being Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini. They are all three examples of big government on steroids, the most dangerous creature that has ever walked the earth, responsible for literally countless often brutal deaths of their own citizens.

The only differences you can find between them are how they went about achieving the exact same goal, government supremacy. Is that what you are basing your ‘standard’ definitions on? If so it’s a difference without a distinction if the end result is the same.

A proper definition should specify the fundamental aspect(s) of a concept that separates the particular concept from all other concepts and place that concept in the hierarchy of concepts. The specified fundamental aspect{s} must exist in an existent entity to some degree. The concept itself refers to all aspects of the referred to existent. The definition stands only as a unique identifier.

So called “standard definitions” sometimes do that. However, for the most important concepts they all too commonly fail miserably. This is largely because the definition is derived from nothing more than common usage (ie public poll of the content of the ubiquitous and foggy “you know”). Then, the content of that foggy “you know” is taken to be the full content of the concept. Then we wonder why we can’t communicate or think. To me, the answer is obvious, there is nothing to communicate nor to think with but approximate fog.

Fascism, socialism, and communism are simply different flavors of mental fog leading to the same end: obliteration of the individual leading to death and destruction. They simply use different word sounds to justify what they do and why they do it.

I agree with Ray, the differences are without distinctions. Its not “Give me liberty or give me death” its Liberty or Death. There is no third option.

I did not invent the ‘standard definitions’ of the political ‘isms’,
the history of which had been thoroughly studied and defined before I
was born (1951). Those definitions certainly do describe distinctions
that exist in reality; competing political ideologies provided the reason for the Cold War. Lumping nearly all forms of government under the label of ‘statist’ will not eliminate the perennial need to define what sort of government we are talking about.

Whatever the ostensible form of government, a wealthy and privileged ruling elite is nearly always in control. The most common form of government, currently and throughout history, is plutocracy.

The 9/11 attacks were a ‘false flag’ operation designed to rally the
brainwashed and gullible citizens of the Western world to support the
bogus ‘War on Terrorism’ against the bogey man of ‘global Islamic
terrorism’.

The Global Warming hoax is a false flag operation designed to rally
the gullible citizenry in support of carbon-trading industrial
monopolies and to persuade them to tolerate drastic energy-use restrictions, heavy taxes, and intimidating surveillance in order to counter the bogus threat of ‘Global Warming’ caused by the benign and beneficial trace gas CO2.

Both the ‘War on Terrorism’ and the Global Warming hoax are all about
maximizing profits for the wealthy ruling elite through social
engineering of the brainwashed citizens.

The ruling elite have fooled rank-and-file conservatives into fighting the bogus ‘War on Terrorism’, and the ruling elite have also fooled environmentalists into fighting the bogus threat of Global Warming.

So what? The important thing is that you don’t question them. You don’t even question the definition of definition or what it means to mean. You appear simply to swallow what you are told wholesale without question. You have given no evidence for what you state. You simply assert and are dismayed that we don’t immediately fall at your feet to worship your wisdom.

My question of you is how can you tolerate simply being a mirror of the opinions of others who themselves are nothing but mirrors of the opinions of others? How can you not look behind what you have been told and check the facts? How can you not question how the opinions you swallow were formed in order to confirm or deny their validity? Are you only a parrot or are you a human with a mind of your own?

Gregory Fegel:201
The Global Warming hoax is a false flag operation designed to rally
the gullible citizenry in support of carbon-trading industrial
monopolies and to persuade them to tolerate drastic energy-use restrictions, heavy taxes, and intimidating surveillance in order to counter the bogus threat of ‘Global Warming’ caused by the benign and beneficial trace gas CO2.

Nope sorry, you’re in fantasy land here. You are expecting me to believe that the same government that came up with “cash for clunkers” is a part of a well oiled international conspiracy that hates Muslims, skyscrapers and CO2. I’m just not buying what your peddling here.

The global warming scam is simply an unfortunate alignment of several powerful self interests. The scientists that promote it are just looking for that next paycheck oops I mean funding check. The politicians literally wet themselves when they heard about it thinking about all the power, money and control they would accumulate. The environmentalists saw a way to finally realize their heaven on earth where people are reduced to digging for grubs. Even futures traders got interested, but hey we will make a market in dead parakeets if we can make a living doing so.

I did not invent the ’standard definitions’ of the political ‘isms’,
the history of which had been thoroughly studied and defined before I
was born (1951). Those definitions certainly do describe distinctions
that exist in reality; competing political ideologies provided the reason for the Cold War. Lumping nearly all forms of government under the label of ’statist’ will not eliminate the perennial need to define what sort of government we are talking about.
Whatever the ostensible form of government, a wealthy and privileged ruling elite is nearly always in control. The most common form of government, currently and throughout history, is plutocracy.

I don’t recall anyone stating you were responsible for these standard definitions not that it matters. What matters is they are worse than useless. They cloud the issue rather than clarify. Just take a few steps back, a deep breath, and a bit of a wider view of history and you will start to notice some patterns. I don’t care what type of government you want to talk about the larger it is, the more power it has, and the less power the individual is left with. It just so happens, that statist governments tend by their nature to do so at a more rabid rate. All governments want to grow. It is what they do. It is about the only thing they do well. Constitutional republics such as the U.S. were the last best attempt at holding this in check yet today 90% of what the government legislates would not stand constititional scrutiny. Because of this the U.S. has been slowly becoming more and more statist.

The test for determining if your government is becoming more statist or less statist is easy. If you feel more and more like a lab rat with each passing year your government is becoming more statist, if less so then the reverse. I remember when flying somewhere used to be fun, now I drive a lot more.

Be carful Greg you never know when you might be talking to one of those ‘wealthy, privileged ruling elite’ type guys, …you know, …just saying.

Lionell Griffith wrote:
“My question of you is how can you tolerate simply being a mirror of the opinions of others who themselves are nothing but mirrors of the opinions of others?”

Egad! Does that include yourself, Lionell? Why do you pretend to know where I get my information, and how I consider it, when you clearly do not know? I make no such judgement about you.

@ Roy Hogue:
The collapse of WTC 1,2, and 7 were obviously the result of controlled demolitions. It is also obvious that you have unquestioningly accepted the official lie about 9/11 in the same way that naive schoolchildren accept the lie of Global Warming. To become informed about the matter, you will need to do some research.

Ray Hibbard wrote:
“I don’t care what type of government you want to talk about the larger it is, the more power it has, and the less power the individual is left with. It just so happens, that statist governments tend by their nature to do so at a more rabid rate. All governments want to grow. It is what they do. It is about the only thing they do well.”

By your definition, all governments are inherently ‘statist’. I actually agree with that. Governments, like most people, are prone to avarice. The world is mostly ruled by gangs of criminals, it always has been, and it’s probably a safe bet to predict that for a long time to come it will remain so.

Ray Hibbard wrote:
“…you never know when you might be talking to one of those ‘wealthy, privileged ruling elite’ type guys…”

Been there, done that. One is a mine owner who left the biggest superfund site in US history for the taxpayers to pay for. The other a computer moghul who exploited his employees and abandoned his infant daughter. I knew them quite well. What does it matter?

Your posts are filled with unsubstantiated claims that are clearly held by the kook fringe. There is no evidence given anywhere that substantiates their out of context and basically paranoid claims. Can you offer such evidence? If so, please enlighten us.

You have indicated an explicit acceptance of the definitions given you by the collective “other” without even questioning them. I question authority from the ground up and back again and then make up my own mind. I have done this since at least high school almost 60 years ago. Why don’t you?

You make assertions without defining your terms so that we know what you are trying to say. You apparently expect us to read your mind. All we have are your words to work with. If we have misunderstood perhaps you need to learn to communicate more clearly and completely. I suggest starting by defining the terms that are critical to your argument. Saying they are the “standard” definitions is simply not enough. I explained why in my earlier post in that most “standard” definitions of critical terms is at best inadequate to completely misleading. I also suggested how to correct that deficiency. Its not easy but it is necessary if your goal is clear thinking along with having the ability to detect and correct your errors.

You have displayed an unwillingness to defend your position with actual evidence, defined experiment or demonstrations, and clearly displayed chains of logic. You simply assert. In contrast, we have defended our position on this blog in exhaustive detail. We back up our assertions. If you can, do so.

In summary, I see anything but an independent mind reaching its own conclusions based upon its own intellectual work. This clearly suggests a mirror mind simply reflecting the opinions of others who similarly are reflecting the opinions of others. This is more than adequate evidence upon which to base my questions.

If this analysis is in error when applied to you, show us otherwise and substantiate your claims. You must understand, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Assertions simply do not make the grade. Either stand and deliver or watch and learn.

Greg, from reading you last several posts I have concluded that as far as you’re concerned the individual has no hope against the vast powerful forces arrayed against him. I can therefore offer no better advice than to find a soft pleasant place to lie down and in the fateful words of National Lampoon Radio Dinner Hours’ version of Deteriorata …
GIVE UP!

@ Roy Hogue:
The collapse of WTC 1,2, and 7 were obviously the result of controlled demolitions. It is also obvious that you have unquestioningly accepted the official lie about 9/11 in the same way that naive schoolchildren accept the lie of Global Warming. To become informed about the matter, you will need to do some research

“Jensen’s interpretation is definitely not in conformance with the standard historical view of the Nazis, who detested communists, and tried to violently eradicate them. Perhaps Mr. Jensen could explain to us why the Nazis, who he says were ‘leftists’, hated communists so much.”

The National Socialists certainly considered themselves socialists, and enacted socialist policies when they gained power. They hated the Communists, who were also a leftist political approach. They competed for the same voters, and there was ani-semitism mixed in with the Nazis’ hatred of the Communists.

What brought the towers down on 9/11 was burning paper. The fires ingnited by burning jet fuel, spread to the tons and tons of business paper in the towers, which burned long enough and hot enough to soften the steel structure holding them up. That’s why it took so long between the time the planes hit, and the towers fell.

There is no question that the Nazis were a left wing, socialist, statist group.

Every time you hear “right wing” and “left wing” it is nothing more than an attempt to cloud your thinking with false dichotomy. Government is not a spectrum from right to left, nor has it ever been. There are many types of government, and many aspects to government.

One particular issue is the question of individual power vs state power. There is not a shadow of a doubt that the Nazi design (and also Communism under both Stalin and Mao) was to subjugate individual rights for the benefit of the state. All citizens existed to serve the state.

Another, different issue is the concept of wealth redistribution. Modern leftist philosophy (and Communism too) considers it a good idea to take from those who have, and give to those who have not (admittedly, the practical implementation of this is another matter). The Nazi party manipulated unions to force down wages while simultaneously increasing employment levels by stimulating the war economy and implementing outright slavery. Thus, Nazi philosophy was perfectly comfortable with the idea of an elite who were offered vastly better privilege than regular workers and soldiers, this distinguishes them from Communists who at the philosophical level did not believe in a privileged elite (but did it anyway by stealth).

Yet another aspect is the need for perpetual warfare (as George Orwell explores) and Nazis were deliberately always at war. This gives a purpose to the state and keeps the citizens obedient. Communists were more willing to close borders and live at peace with their neighbors (albeit a cold and distrustful peace). The modern concepts of “War on Drugs”, “War on Terror” and “War on Freedom” contain echoes of perpetual warfare.

In addition, Communists at least gave lip service to Democratic rule and most modern parties who would describe themselves as socialist also consider themselves Democratic. Although Nazism originally came to power by elected majority, they soon shifted to the power of the gang and the gun, and stopped bothering to even pretend to be Democratic.

In the aspect of state-sponsored lies and propaganda, both Communists and Nazis did it, neither had any problems with it. Most totalitarian centrally administered systems seem to go this way (including religious states). Propaganda is a powerful tool, free speech and free thinking are dangerous to the supreme authority.

By the way the name “National Socialist Workers Party” was chosen before the Night of the Long Knives and the roots of Nazism were much closer to traditional working class Communism. Hitler used disgruntled workers as a stepping stone to power, but many of the original ideals were thrown away as it became apparent that the discipline of the military officer class was more valuable to them than the raw anger of the working class.

It’s probably also worth pointing out that the system of Fascism came from Italy and represented a merging of the economic powers of corporations and the social powers of large unions into the authoritarian power of a strong central government. Nazism borrowed from the Italian model but the elements were used in a less violent manner by Tony Blair’s “third way” government putting an end to the endless bickering between government and unions during Thatcher. Australians would recognize the Hawke/Keating government as bringing together large unions and big business under a central plan known as “the Accord”. Modern Germany runs something close to the same model.

These governments provide some milder system of central planning and are happy to perpetually make war on abstract concepts (with the occasional real war just to keep things going) but still offer some individual freedoms and some measure of Democracy. The concept of the “nanny state” has come along as a modern invention and I doubt whether Hitler, Mao or Stalin would be enthusiastic about exhausting resources protecting citizens from themselves. Maybe this is a product of the nuclear age or just some insanity naturally springing from large numbers of regulators with absolutely no purpose to their lives.

The global warming conspiracy raises many issues about what we know and how we know it (epistemology). This is not the place to cover all bases, but briefly
- governments are capable of massive scams which millions of well-educated people believe
- the only known approach to defeating these scams are painstaking, individual, no-appeal-to-authority, open, no-hiding-the-data, attempts to DISPROVE theories – ie. the scientific method

This method is a product of the individualistic societies of North-Western Europe – with a lot of input from the Islamic world. Collectivism of any kind, left or right, Communist International or Spanish Inquisition, is the enemy of this method. Groupthink and political correctness are their weapons. And ad-hominem attacks. Amongst their weaponry are such diverse elements as groupthink, emotional blackmail…

One of the points raised by the global warming hoax is the creeping use of the word ‘denier’ to slander skeptics. Climate skeptics reject this word for themselves, but tend to accept it for the people it was originally used for. These people (and I hasten to add I don’t agree with them) are also slandered, since most of them question the extent of a major historical event, rather than deny it. This questioning is valid. Anyone who has been subject to ridicule or persecution for skepticism should defend all the others. I defend the right to question the extent of the Holocaust, who killed JFK and Princess Di, the cause of September 11th – and when it comes to global warming, I believe there really is a conspiracy. I have arrived at this conclusion by applying the first principles of scientific method (Popper), reading carefully-written refutations of global warming by McIntyre, McKittrick et al., and watching Mann, Jones & co. squirm as the truth comes out. 2010 will be the Year of the Skeptic.

I’d love to see some research done into the ties between climate change alarmist/scientists & Big Oil – yes, not the so-called ‘deniers’ but the opposite.

I first twigged onto the idea in the climate-gate emails about scientists meeting with Shell Oil. Then an anonymous comment by someone about how oil companies WANT things like carbon taxes and cap and trade and so on, since it would push prices up without them having to produce more. Basically, environmentalists work where anti-trust regulations had previously stopped these companies from price-rigging.

Also, sites like desmogblog and pretty much every AGW-supporter, when faced with any scientific evidence that contradicts their orthodoxy are the first to cry Big Oil funding!!! This meme has spread so much that it seems to be pretty widely believed, yet the evidence for it is incredibly flimsy. The most they’ve managed to find are a few grants to conservative think-tanks from Exxon.

Lastly, look at how some of the most notable alarmists made their original fortunes: Oil. Maurice Strong first rose the corporate ranks in the oil business despite being a high school dropout and Al Gore’s family fortune came partly from Occidental Oil.

I do too, but once you start counting the dead in millions, a few here or a few there doesn’t penetrate the comprehension any more. It would be nice to get the numbers exactly correct, and various people have worked toward that cause but does it fundamentally change the conclusions?

To be fair, a lot of ethnic groups suffered in WWII but the Jews got the best publicity out of it, so many victims of totalitarianism have been forgotten. People think that racism was the heart of the matter, but racism was not the fundamental problem. The problem was a belief in purity (any kind of purity) and a small group of people being sure they knew what was best for everyone else. Racial hatred was something the Nazis found useful to tap into, they could have used any other hatred in the same place.

I knew a guy (let’s call him George) who walked to Stalingrad wearing a German uniform (and got back), and he was a basic work-with-your-hands kind of guy who didn’t have any special education, nor any deep understanding of the world. It was never his great idea to start a war or fight the Soviets. In retrospect it was a damn stupid idea and although the guy I talked to was amazingly lucky (on many occasions) and survived the experience, millions didn’t survive. So where’s the “Holocaust” memorial for those guys?

If you don’t want to blame George and his dead mates for what happened, then there aren’t a whole lot of people left that can be blamed. But if you do blame George for getting caught up into such a situation and doing whatever he had to in order to survive, then you get stuck with the logical necessity of blaming the Jews equally much for not fighting back against the system when they had the chance.

I’m a straight forward no nonsense kind of guy. You made statements that can’t stand up under examination. So I baited a hook and made a simple statement. You came back with the same worn out conspiracy theory I’ve heard over and over. But you don’t support it you just demand that I do some “research”. Well, sorry Greg, it doesn’t work that way. If you say it then you need to support it with evidence and sound argument. If you have that then out with it, let me see it. Otherwise you fail the test like all the others who believe this stuff.

And if you want research, let’s talk about the twin tower collapse being examined by those with the engineering and metallurgical knowledge to be credible. They determined that the fire resulting from burning jet fuel and office paperwork just simply weakened the building to the point where it couldn’t support its own weight. Here is a link to a good explanation of what happened. The conspiracy theory (including such notable experts as Rosie O’Donnell) complains that the fire couldn’t have been hot enough to melt steel. And indeed it was not. But anyone with some knowledge of the properties of metals will know that the strength of steel is affected by much lower temperatures than it takes to melt it. Have fun.

You make an interesting observation. However, I’m not aware of any other group that suffered the magnitude and intensity of intentional cruelty and just plain cold blooded murder inflicted on the Jews during WWII. So I don’t think it’s just a matter of the Jews getting the best publicity out of it.

Maybe I’m just ignorant of something or I fail to get the point you want me to get. But that’s the way I see it at the moment.

Perhaps we need to use the much abused excuse: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Unfortunately this obliterates one of the first principles of logical argument. He who asserts the affirmative is obliged to offer the proof. He who asserts the negative may provide contradictory evidence but he need only wait steadfastly for the presentation of a valid and complete proof. The reason being that if the object of the argument does not exist, there is no attribute nor behavior to identify or demonstrate (ie proof by reduction to the facts of reality). There is no physical consequence of absence. There is only lack of fulfillment of wish, whim, or fantasy. Thus proof of absence is not possible to present and the responsibility for proof falls on the affirmative side of argument.

The above is not made more true by attributing it to one or more remote in time and space authority. It is not made less true by not pointing to one or more remote in time and space authority. Its truth or falsity resides in its meaning and its implications for human thought and action.

Generally speaking I think that governments are never to be trusted any further than you can throw them. It’s kind of like having a sheep dog with a tendency to bite. You need him for the service he provides but you have to keep an eye on him. If he bites you have to put him down, regardless of how fond you are of him. This is a lot easier done with a revolver than with your bare hands.

Good men are always reluctant to reach for the violent option. I have been reading the book “On Killing” by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman. I was somewhat surprised to read that in WWII the percentage of solders that fired their weapons at the enemy was about 20%. The other even more surprising finding was that the fear of loss of life or limb was not the major cause of battle fatigue; it was being placed in a situation where one might be responsible for killing. It would appear that humans share the same strong instinct not to kill members of their own species. Kind of gives you hope.

But no matter, once this was understood, modern training methods were employed to get that firing rate up till by the time Vietnam rolled around they were at 95%. It became a conditioned response to the point the man wasn’t even sure he had done it until some time after the fact.

However, I’m not aware of any other group that suffered the magnitude and intensity of intentional cruelty and just plain cold blooded murder inflicted on the Jews during WWII.

If you just want numbers of deaths and stats then R. J. Rummel keeps a page titled “Powerkills” with listing and some notes. There are danged big numbers on that page, Soviet and Chinese killing of their own citizens come tops in the total number stats. Other historic sources discuss large massacres before the 20th century as well. Sadly, such things are not as unusual as most people think, and the main reason the numbers in the 20th century were so big was higher populations and more advanced weapons.

In terms of highest kill rates, the firestorm bombing of Tokyo killed something in the order of 100k in a single night which would have to be high up in the list, along with the well-known nuke strikes.

I think Cambodia comes reasonably high up in the “per-capita” stakes made famous by the movie “Killing Fields”. No doubt the margin of error is high in this case.

Hard to put an objective measure on “intentional cruelty and just plain cold blooded murder”, and hard to even know where to start, but the Japanese treatment of prisoners was notoriously bad (and general civilians in occupied territories were also badly treated, esp in China). There were some recent cases where old Japanese men had dictated their experiences of the war to get them off their chest before they died… some English translations have been published on the Internet, nuff said about that, really nasty stuff.

[...] Anyway, the magnificent Jo Nova has done a really good number on New Scientist in her blog: You might think journalists at a popular science magazine would be able to investigate and reason. [...]

I would have been pleased to continue participating in the discussion, but I found that my access to the Joanne Nova website’s comments section was blocked and I was unable to post here. Why this happened I do not know. This entry is a attempt to see if my access is still blocked.

Hello just thought i would tell you something.. This is twice now i’ve landed on your blog in the last 2 days hunting for completely unrelated things. Spooky or what? If you wishto exchange the links with us please let me know.

[...] Anyway, the magnificent Jo Nova has done a really good number on New Scientist in her blog: You might think journalists at a popular science magazine would be able to investigate and reason. [...]